


A Kingdom With No Royalty (or, The War Is Over, Go Home)

by the_sockpuppet



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2019-10-05 16:16:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17328317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_sockpuppet/pseuds/the_sockpuppet
Summary: Catra takes over the Horde, ceases the war, and has told everyone: leave the Fright Zone alone and we'll leave you all in peace. Also, the Fright Zone now has medical benefits, socialized taxing, and cheap power.After two years of war, Adora and the Best Friend Squad find it impossible to believe the war is over, and sneak into the Fright Zone to investigate.





	1. Chapter 1

//

TRYING THE SAME THING TWICE

//

They went for the prisons first. Adora felt it was a predictable move, assuming Catra knew they were launching a stealth initiative, but it was still the most reliable way in. For one thing Adora wanted to spring everyone in it out, give them a chance to get out of the Fright Zone since the... power shift. And for another, it wasn't as though the likes of Kyle were smart enough to beef the prison security intelligently after one break in. They'd just add grills to the sewers, or add more people -- which only meant having to steal some uniforms. The oldest, most reliable trick in the book. The uniforms were scratchy, as both Glimmer and Bow complained, but they did the job. Nobody had caught on to them yet.

The Fright Zone itself had not changed that much. The sky was still an angry red -- strange how she thought of it that way now; it was the only sky she knew for sixteen years -- and everything still smelled like smoke and metal. The thunk of her boots on metal plating still felt right. As the Best Friend Squad marched, it was easy to remember how everything used to be.  _Thunka-thunka-thunka_  -- she used to know how many people were coming after her and Catra, just by the sound of everyone's regulation boots.

"Guh," she said, running into Bow's back, knocked out of her reverie.

"Adora!" Glimmer whined behind her. "We need to stay in formation!"

Right. A straight line. They were already in the prison, and just needed to get to the cell blocks. The corridor they'd been walking down finally opened up into the main block -- into nothingness. The lights were dim in the central hub. The thrum of electricity that went through every building was a distant thing, stopping at the corridor.

"The cell block is completely deactivated," Adora said. "Maybe they're using other blocks?"

"We could hack into their system and find out."

"It's not the same as First Ones tech, Glimmer," Bow said. Adora wanted nothing more than to bury her head in her hands. Getting to the other sectors of the Fright Zone would be harder. They should have tried to conduct an aerial survey to check. Given the change in power, it was possible that they'd cut power to less important areas and pumped it elsewhere... but why keep the prisons empty? Unless Catra had decided to do away with prisoners and just... dispose of dissent wholesale.

"Oh boy," a voice behind them said. "That's five bucks, Catra told you it would be the Best Friend Squad."

The trio turned to face Scorpia and Lonnie.

"Damn! I thought for sure they'd bring all the princesses!"

Before Adora could even say "it's a trap!" someone had blasted them with a sticky gob that left her swordless, the sword retracting into the darkness. Glimmer counteracted with a blast of light which barely fazed Scorpia -- the blast of magic fizzled around her, revealing a force field. With a bang and a blinding light, the same force field surrounded the squad.

"I guess that means Catra's taking the entire pot!" A third voice joined the fray from behind: Entrapta. "She guessed the date, the time, the method, the place..."

"Guessed? Excuse you, I don't guess. I learned how to hy-po-the-sis."

"Hypothesize," Entrapta corrected, but without much strength.

From several floors up, Catra jumped down, landing with barely a sound. She circled around the force field, winking as Bow and Glimmer exhausted their magic and arrows. Glimmer tried several times to teleport, but a zap of red would always jolt her out of her magic. She was shouting too, but everything seemed distant -- all Adora could think was:  _she's really alive._

And really in charge.

Catra's voice cut through the screaming, cut through the yelling, cut through all the noise like she was the only one in the room: "Kiddo, please, you come in my kingdom, knock out my guards, assault my advisors, and have the gall to be mad at me."

Catra looked straight at Adora then. "Is this princess etiquette, huh? You know all that stuff now, right?"

Adora didn't say "Let us out," she might once have. She didn't say anything, having learned her mouth was the least useful thing about her.

"Oh wow, you're quiet," Catra said. "That's new."

"We did say she got less talky as the war went on," Scorpia said.

"Yeah, you did say that."

Adora catches herself before she says "give me back my sword." Catra would do no such thing. But she says something more obvious instead: "You're alive."

Duh," Catra says. "And I don't have the fancy cape, but I pretty much run this place."

"Oh yeah, Queen of the Prison Cell, huh," Bow says, his arms at the ready to take an arrow and seize whatever chance they'd get.

"Could someone shut the twunk up, please?"

"Um," Entrapta says, "That's a forcefield, it wouldn't be a good one if we put a hole and let some sleeping gas in for the BFF Squad."

Catra groaned. "Why did I let you decide how to restrain them..."

"Because you said we don't want to hurt them," Entrapta replied promptly, loud enough for everyone to hear.

"That was a rhetorical question," Catra said, but the damage had been done.

"You knew we were coming here," Adora said. Again, stating the obvious, but she needed some way to get Catra's attention.

"Next time, get a one-way forcefield, okay? They're in the armory, you know," Catra said, choosing to chastise Entrapta. "They're how all our prison cells literally work. You know, how we actually get food to the prisoners while they can't get out?"

"Horde tech can be so... barbaric sometimes, okay?"

"Oh no, barbaric tech. Still works. Like fire, right?"

"Are we going to keep arguing or... do something about the prisoners?"

That was Lonnie. Scorpia seemed content to have Catra and Entrapta bicker all day.

"Okay, we move the forcefield along till we hit the back of a cell. For now."

The forcefield started to move, a half-sphere propelling itself towards a ground floor cell. Bow and Glimmer, still somehow yelling against everything, tried to put their weight against the moving wall of the forcefield. Adora came quietly, thinking only:  _Catra's alive. Really alive._

And:

_Catra doesn't want to hurt us._

//

//

//

Military victories stopped feeling good a long time ago to Catra. But winning in bets was somewhat more entertaining, even if the money just went back to the 'government' -- cuz she won most of the time.

"Is it like, a telepathic bond?"

Entrapta again, with the social/human experiments and data gathering.

"No," Catra said. "We just grew up together."

"But she should have known that the jail would be better fortified."

"The Horde wasn't exactly a shining beacon of intelligence before I took over," Catra muttered, thinking (rather unkindly) of Kyle. She thought of herself when she started out, asking Entrapta about every little thing. _"What does that mean? What does this mean?"_  And yet... she'd crawled her way here: a former battle room now being used as a rec room for whatever shock troop was lucky enough to book it for their Purges and Princesses campaigns. In this case, however, they were using it to celebrate another round of bets about the next moves of the Princess Alliance.

Entrapta's robot was computing everyone's winnings and tossing a spray of confetti into the ventilated air for even the tiniest winning won. Kyle, who had guessed that the Trio would knock out the guards, had also won a credit or two. Catra, at the head of the long table, her half-cape slung around the chair, watched and occasionally clapped as needed. She tried not to be too droll about it.

"Everything good?" Scorpia asked.

"Yes," Catra said, because while Adora hadn't learned princess etiquette, Catra had learned how to talk to people. Even people like Scorpia, who had no concept of personal space.

The loud cheering, drowning out the hum of the lights and air conditioning, almost seemed to echo. This was not a place for loud noises; it was contained and the air vents were too filthy, trapping everything inside and mucking up her nose. One day, she thought to herself, staring at the table that hadn't been powered on to show a military simulation in a year, someday, she'd put windows in this place. Or someone after her would. Or maybe it wouldn't work, since the Fright Zone was dark and scary and no light would ever shine onto it. She didn't know.

"Boss!" Entrapta screeched, barely giving Catra enough time to look out and jump away from an onslaught of water. Entrapta’s stupid super soaker. "You're down and broody again!"

Two years ago Catra would have been angry, would have hissed, would have sulked out. But then, a lot of things had changed. "I'm tired! I'm going to sleep."

//

GET WITH THE PROGRAM

//

The next day, Catra had Kyle put on a transmission to all kingdoms:

(1) That they had requested to be left alone in the Fright Zone and that they had abandoned all military campaigns, only to be stealthily attacked by the Princess Alliance and She-Ra.

(2) That She-Ra and her friends were unharmed in a prison cell and that the terms of ransom for Bright Moon Citizens would be so many tonnes of seedlings, to be delivered by land to the Horde.

(3) That the neutral ground for the exchange would be the Whispering Woods, closer to the Horde side.

(4) That they had 24 hours to accept the Horde's very generous terms and one week to prepare.

The week turned out to be unnecessary. As with the last time a princess was captured, Angella agreed within the day and by evening Perfuma's kingdom was delivering seeds to Bright Moon. It would take about two days to march to the halfway point for Bright Moon.

"Do you trust them?" Scorpia asked, at a meeting of all Force Captains and advisors.

"No. They'll have a lot of backup. We have the princess and She-Ra, she's totally going to be on her guard. Plus, we only asked for seeds. They will be suspicious we didn't ask for more."

Rogelio, who almost never said anything, grumbled. "Why is being nice so hard?!"

"We're not being nice, we're being strategic," Catra countered. "And that's not easy. I'm guessing Number Six has figured out a way to Bright Moon by now with his battalion. They will deliver data to the Princess Alliance about us and insist on continuing the war. We need to prepare for that eventuality."

"With seedlings."

"With a food source that doesn't have to be pillaged constantly from neighboring villages."

"Ohhhhh."

Catra didn't usually pace, especially not in front of a crowd, but these days, she did. "How many battalions were you thinking, Scorpia?"

"One. And a tank company."

"Okay. We can expect retaliation when they learn how to read the terms tomorrow. Are the BFFs in stasis?"

Entrapta: "Kind of overkill to freeze them, but yeah."

"We do NOT want them waking up in the middle of the ransom."

"Yes, yes!"

//

//

//

On the morning of the ransom, the horde parked the tanks well out of sight, some distance away from the neutral clearing in the Whispering Woods. On one end was Queen Angella, and on the other side was Scorpia and an armored carrier. From within the horde tech headquarters, Entrapta controlled green drones parked atop the forest trees. "Feed is... clear," she said, testing their visuals, her eyes shining bright against the light of the terminal. They had four angles with which to watch the exchange. Experimental and lightly armored, the drones were easy to destroy; even easier to lose were the relays that carried the signal from the Whispering Woods to the Fright Zone. Regardless of how the woods would eventually destroy the signal, they needed the feed, so the experiment continued, to Entrapta's glee.

Catra, from another mobile/terminal she carried on her person, crackled a "great job." Uninterested in the whole affair, she instead walked by Adora's cell. Most of the prison remained dark but for the lights embedded on the floor and walls leading up to the prison's only occupant. Inside her cell, Adora seethed, which was pretty much how things had always been between them since the war.

"What have you --"

"Done with my friends," Catra finished. "They're getting ransomed. You're staying here."

"What! Angella would never agree to..."

"To leaving you? Apparently no one knows how to read or listen. Or whatever. You see, the terms were for Bright Moon citizens. You're... a Horde soldier by birth and I believe that as a Princess, She-Ra would have her own kingdom or domain or whatever, and is technically not a Bright Moon citizen. You can't be the citizen of a peer, a princess, being one yourself."

Adora banged on the wall. She was still so easy to rile up. "They..."

"Won't agree to it once they realize my deception," Catra said, again finishing all the words for Adora. "There's nothing deceptive about it, they didn't ask any questions and they just don't know how to read. There's a difference. Not that you'd be smart enough to know that. We have a tank company and a battalion that will provide a deterrent to immediate violence. They will take what they can get and likely will regroup first before considering another move; if they try something dirty with the seeds they're sending to us we can recover from that. But it's risky to start a fight with us while Glimmer and Bow are knocked out. They will only wake up 24 hours after today." Catra dropped the dry, disaffected tone. She needed Adora to understand what made her a prisoner of the Horde.

"When I assumed power in the Horde, about half the force captains insisted on a trial by battle. This was, of course, a plan to try to dethrone me ASAP and maybe try to salvage Hordak from the scrap heap I dumped his cybernetic body in. He's been recycled, by the way, and you'll have to take my word that I wanted him as dead as you never wanted to admit to yourself. Anyway, the older force captains proposed that the leader should be the winner of their tournament. I disagreed, since, y'know, I did all the work in getting rid of him AND Shadow Weaver. So I told them they could surrender and pledge loyalty to me or they could leave."

"Half left," Adora said.

"As I said, yeah. Mostly Force Captains 6 to 10. I did this because there was a possibility some of them would simply take their soldiers and build a village close to Bright Moon. They're not all bloodthirsty. So there was no reason not to give them that chance."

At Adora's face, Catra snorted.

"What?"

"Your face looks dumb," Catra said. "Like you're thinking how to put things together and nothing's coming up."

"It's true that Hordak's gone?"

"Everyone who ever gave me a hard time is gone," Catra said. She didn't say it to gloat. It was the truth. "I told you when you left: that we'd be in charge of things one day. Well, I'm in charge of things now."

"I never thought that you'd... be disloyal."

"To Hordak? A cruel, creepy skeleton of a person that constantly upped the things I had to do to 'prove my competence and loyalty' to him? To Shadow Weaver? Who hated me? Did you think I wanted to stay in the Horde, growing up, when I wasn't the perfect soldier? I wanted to leave. But even just thinking that made me feel disloyal... to you. So I stayed."

Catra let that sink into Adora for a beat, then continued. "About the Force Captains, the fight-y ones are likely to try to convince Angella that I'm some cruel despot that tortured you and your friends and is keeping you in pain and agony. They're going to try to break our 'stalemate' and convince the Princess Alliance to start fighting again."

"You should have returned me to them!"

"Their pitch would have been exactly the same thing. Sure, your being a prisoner can be used against the Horde, but if I had passed you back, they would have sold you the same pitch. I mean, sorry Adora, but I kinda see you falling for it. A sword started talking to you and you totally went off believing you had some destiny."

Adora had nothing to say to that.

"Now, I have you, and I've told you everything that's happened in the Horde. You know what is at stake. At least I hope you get it. You're going to say that you're not being tortured, and that you are willing to stay in the Horde as our ward and surety that we will not be invaded by the Princess Alliance. That will give us enough leverage to keep the peace in Etheria."

"No," Adora said.

Catra's ears had stayed straight the whole time she had been speaking. It did not twitch now. "I can't have She-Ra on anyone's side, threatening what fragile peace the Horde has now. You're a weapon. Whenever someone sees you on their side they're emboldened to do things, to try to manipulate you for their end. With you in the Horde, I obviously can't use She-Ra, and neither can the Alliance. With you in the Alliance, who knows whose story you'll believe."

"You make it sound like I can't think for myself!"

"The Horde proved it was evil so many times when we were children and you never saw it. You have the perception of an ... I don't know! A blind elephant. If those things really did exist. Cruelty isn't just in war with grand gestures of destruction. It's in how Shadow Weaver raised us."

That had gone on for much more than Catra intended. She got back on track. "I cannot have She-Ra on any side, but I can have Adora in the Horde, where we know she'll never use the Sword. If you refuse my terms, we'll kill you and make sure no She-Ra is born again, either by hacking the core of Etheria or by destroying the sword. Either way. You have a week to decide. The choice is yours."

"And," Catra added, as she pushed a button on her portable console. "We're obviously moving you so that nobody can try to rescue you."

Adora couldn't get a word in as sleep gas flooded the cell.

//

//

//

TBC

 

AN:

Catra is 20 in this story, Adora is a little younger at 19.

Wrote this in about two hours, so I hope it's still okay.


	2. Chapter 2

IN THE DARK

 

Catra's last punch was a long, wound up affair. She slung her shoulder back, bent her right arm. The punching bag swung towards her as she rammed it with everything she could give.

 

The punching bag did nothing more than absorb the force with its mass, and stop. With a snarl, Catra's claws swiped through the material until the stuffing came out.

 

The rest of the training hall was just as clawed up. Training dummies everywhere were decapitated, weapons were everywhere; she’d pick one up, swing it around, toss it until the whole floor was littered with staves or batons. Catra was sure the clean up crew would whisper, would talk. She knew she should have cared more about the equipment. She could see it now -- the cleanup crew would show up, toss each other a look that said "our new boss is a psycho bitch," and the fragile allegiance she had with some of the younger force captains could potentially splinter. And yet of those who remained, none of them had defected yet to any other ex-Horde faction. Catra couldn’t take all the credit for that.

 

The door thudded.

 

It was Scorpia, Catra could tell by the sound. Scorpia let herself in while Catra ignored her to jump and punch some targets at an obstacle course -- already demolished an hour ago -- some distance down the long training hall. By the time she'd finished jumping to the top platform and re-swiping the last training dummy (already clawed up from a previous run and hanging by a wire from the top),  Scorpia had finished with the staves and was picking up dummy heads, impaling them back in their place on dummy bodies.

 

"So, I guess reconnecting with your friend didn't go so well?" Scorpia waggled her eyes. Catra only forgave her because it was, well, her.

 

"That's not why she's here," Catra said, curbing a wild urge to throttle Scorpia.

 

"What! I thought she was here the whole time so the two of you could talk!"

 

"No! We need her to secure the peace of the Horde, dammit!"

 

"I thought that was just an excuse," Scorpia joked. Catra punched a dummy’s head that Scorpia had just reattached. It flew clean off and thumped around the room. Scorpia pouted. "Okay, I'm sorry. What happened?"

 

 _I made an empty threat._ Hordak and Shadow Weaver taught her never to do that. It weakened her position, even Adora knew Catra wouldn't risk murdering her when the rest of the rebellion was so freshly 'deceived' (by their own carelessness) with the ransom conditions that had just finished a few days ago.

 

She’d made that empty threat because she’d been angry. It was a cold anger, sure, but it was not going to help her keep winning.

 

To Scorpia, Catra only said, "You'll be in charge of informing her of her options and negotiating with her terms as a ward. If she agrees to it. And if she doesn't... she can stay in that cell and rot in there."

 

"Wait, what?"

 

"That's your assignment this week, Scorpia!"

 

The less she dealt with Adora, the better. Catra resolved not to return to the Ward's wing. Adora wouldn't see her -- which was really the plan, anyway.

 

//

//

//

 

Adora had spent most of the first day in her new cell screaming and kicking and exploring every nook and cranny, once she'd come to. She'd sniffed the place -- the air was stale, as though they'd just opened up the room. It didn't smell like anything, either. As far as she could tell it was a regular barracks room, maybe even for a lieutenant or platoon squad leader. The room even had its own bathroom, with a shower. And a table with a pitcher of water. But the walls had been thick and reinforced instead of the mouldy partitions she was accustomed to. With nothing better to do, and no windows, she eventually fell exhausted to her bed, despite the strangeness of everything. She was alone; without even a guard, though she suspected she was being recorded. But not a single person passed by her corridor, not a single footstep could be heard. The lights down the corridor eventually faded into nothing. When she got hungry, no food came -- maybe Catra was going to starve her out for intel. But she could scream or shout, and she did, until she realized that no one would hear.

 

Sensory deprivation? And starving her? How was she supposed to even think about Catra's "offer" of having her as a ward to ensure the peace? It sounded so slick, sickeningly manipulative...

 

It reminded her of Shadow Weaver. Then again, she was in the Fright Zone. It was hard not to remember, hard not to think about it, even if she tried to forget.

 

Was it even fair to think of Catra and Shadow Weaver in that same way? All Horde campaigns had ended since she came into power more than a month ago. But how was Adora supposed to trust that the peace would go on? Other princesses only called it a stalemate, convinced that Catra would resume after her coup, that she was only buying time until she'd regained firepower. And now Adora had no way of knowing what was happening, despite being in the heart of enemy territory.

 

In most days, fighting for the alliance, Adora could tell herself that she could live with those decisions. But in the dark, in the dim, artificial lights of the Fright Zone, she wondered if she'd ever killed anyone she'd known here.

 

"C'mon," she told herself. It was her duty to stay her course till the end. Catra was just trying to faze her, make her crack. And it had only been a day (or more?) and already Adora couldn't hold her sins at bay.

 

A stray thought made its way to the surface of her mind. _This is why you keep failing._

 

Catra must have known she was this weak. Catra must have counted on it.

 

//

//

//

 

"You mean to tell me no one's fed her for 36 hours?"

 

Rogelio gulped. Scorpia knew he wasn't used to thinking about logistics or anything remotely like it. But in Scorpia's head, Adora was already a ward. And princess etiquette very clearly stated that wards were members of the group, and under the Horde's protection. They were not prisoners of war.

 

"He says we'll have a nice lunch ready for her," Kyle said, patting his buddy's shoulder. "We've just never really had a prisoner. That we'd cook food for. So we forgot."

 

"Our nutrition program is new," Scorpia conceded. "Man, and for years we had to eat that weird stuff! I was scared to find out what it actually was."

 

From the back, one of the newly appointed cooks yelled back: "Hey, our rations were synthesized for maximum nutrients! But yeah, the new stuff is... nice."

 

Nice was putting it mildly. The new food smelled good. On the day the Horde discovered garlic, Rogelio put it on everything. People made excuses to drop by the kitchen just to get a sniff of the stuff. And as Rogelio had to cook every day, nearly every hour for large enough batches to cover everyone in the Horde, everyone had gotten addicted to the smell of broth and salt and garlic.

 

"I think that guy has a permanently busted nose," Kyle whispered as he led Scorpia out. "Nice? NICE? Rogelio's stuff is like twenty times better! How did we even live without this stuff for so long? Is this what the princesses had been keeping from us?"

 

Scorpia laughed.

 

//

//

//

 

Originally it should have been the plan to just dump the food into the receptacle in the Adora Monitoring Room and wait for a slot to come out on Adora's side. But based on the videos Adora had spent the last day trying to find cracks in the walls. She probably needed company, and the Horde did not have unlimited resources to spend on ripped walls.

 

"Hi there!" Scorpia said. Through the green haze of the forcefield, she could see Adora scrunched up in bed.

 

"We've got lunch! Some green stuff on the menu. And uh, synthesized protein. For old time's sake. But it has garlic on it! And salt!" Scorpia held out the tray, beyond the boundaries of the one-way forcefield.

 

The smell must have finally made it to Adora, because she got up. She walked over and took the tray, and for a second, it looked like she was going to try punching the forcefield, but instead unballed her fist. "W-What is this?"

 

Scorpia repeated herself.

 

"Is this some kind of poison? The Horde never serves this stuff!"

 

"Ouch, oh, better not let Rogelio hear that. He put extra effort into this."

 

"Rogelio!?"

 

"Yeah, apparently whenever we go out to Princess controlled territory some of the guards funnel black market items. And food like this is one of them. They call the ingredients seasoning? I don't know. Since Catra took over, everyone does it in the open now. So the Horde High Command gets to try it out too."

 

"Right, the seedlings. So the Horde has a garden?"

 

"Kind of? It's all artificial light and soil from the edge of the Whispering Wood. Too soon to say, though. We only started it. The garlic was an import."

 

Adora gave in and tried it. Hungry, she filled her spork with the greens and mushy protein. And ate. And chewed. And then she went to her table and ate some more, standing up the whole time.

 

She didn't say a word, but she was a noisy eater, crunching on the vegetables like she'd never eaten them in the Princess Alliance.

 

After Adora's last, hasty swallow, she said, "I never knew Rogelio could cook." This time she went to the front of her cell willingly.

 

"We didn't either! And neither did he, he's just learning. But we're really happy he found his place in the kitchen."

 

"So he's," Adora paused, and Scorpia guessed she was thinking it over, "-- the head cook now."

 

"Yup." For good measure, Scorpia added, "And Lonnie's a force captain, and Kyle is our external communications officer." She knew that Adora might like it more to hear what had happened to her old team. Everyone knew who her team was -- all covered in Force Captain Orientation, under the new curriculum.

 

"I... see."

 

"Catra told me you guys had a fight again," Scorpia said. "She was just trying to help. She really thinks that having you here will keep any conflicts localized. That's what she said. She even read up on Etherian law to understand what options we had. Options that, y'know, didn't involve immediately murdering everyone."

 

"It's just so strange. And why are you being so nice? And... why haven't I seen you in a while?"

 

"I was reassigned," Scorpia said. "I did most of the supply route work. Because I'm a tank, Catra says. I'm better off making sure our supply lines are unbroken."

 

"So you weren't in the front lines."

 

"Sometimes, I was. But we were told to avoid direct conflict with you. Too risky. Especially when you started mastering your powers. There was a radius we'd draw around you, based on the amount of magic you could already throw."

 

It was okay to say that, right? Because they weren't enemies any more.

 

"So uh, got any more questions? I could do this all day." She sat down on the floor. Adora followed. Scorpia smiled. Progress.

 

"H-How are my friends?"

 

"Our drones reported that they're back in Bright Moon, so they should be waking up by now. We had to keep them in stasis in case they woke up in the middle of the ransom and started shooting stuff up."

 

"How do I know that's not a lie?"

 

Scorpia gave it some thought. "How about I let a line patch through to Bright Moon, and you can talk to your friends?"

 

"Really? You can do that? Won't Catra, I don't know, shoot this whole idea down?"

 

_Do whatever you have to do to keep her here._

 

"She might be okay with it. And besides, you have to accept our wardship. So you'd have to make an announcement too. Oh! We could do it at the same transmission."

 

Adora scowled at that. "I'll never agree to being a prisoner of the Horde."

 

"Aww, c'mon, you're a princess. You know a wardship is more than that. You wouldn't be a prisoner. We wouldn't treat you like one. You just have to make it official."

 

Adora still looked like she wasn't convinced. Dang it! Scorpia always came on too strong. "Look," she said, trying to regain her footing. "You have two choices. You could be a prisoner here, and never talk to your friends, or you could accept your place here and we'd let you even roam around the Horde, maybe even get a job. I know it's sudden," but then, Scorpia thought to herself, everything was sudden in war, "but please think about it. Catra said she could wait one or two weeks. She probably told you 'just one week!' but she always gives extensions when we're late for our reports. But if we don't have a transmission, we're sure Bright Moon won't take your silence lying down, and we might have another battle. We're trying to avoid that."

 

"Because the Horde would lose, wouldn't they," Adora said, suddenly turning the tables. Uh oh. Scorpia hadn't said that right. Pressing her advantage, Adora added, "I know there's only 50% of you left. It would be easy for Bright Moon to take over."

 

Great, now Adora was forcing that card.

 

After some careful thought, Scorpia said, "You come from the Horde. You know we won't surrender. And you know Catra." As painful as an old memory was, Scorpia knew Catra when she fought: "Catra fights like she's possessed. If we fight for the Fright Zone, she would sooner destroy this place than let it go down under Princess rule." Scorpia didn't know if that was actually true. But surely, Catra would fight till her last breath if she got cornered.

 

"S-So what?"

 

"Do you really want that?" Scorpia said. "Did you ever really want to fight against Lonnie and Kyle?"

 

"No! But I had to. And I will again if i have to."

 

"That's what I'm saying! Fighting isn't our only option anymore. Everything could be neatly fixed if we just..."

 

"I don't believe that. The Horde lied to me for years."

 

"That's not Catra's Horde. Weren't you two best friends? Shouldn't you trust her?"

 

There, she was being as smart as she could about her negotiations.

 

"We aren't friends," Adora said. "She said that herself."

 

Scorpia groaned. Why did that kitty cat have to make everything hard? Scorpia nearly had Adora agreeing to be a ward. She should have focused on the great food. No, this conversation was a dead end.

 

"I'm sure I gave you a lot to think about," Scorpia said. "I'll ask Catra if I can show you around, okay? I swear to you Adora, the Horde is better. I'm glad we have lunch now! with real food."

 

TOUR GUIDE

 

Catra gave the go-ahead to give Adora a tour. She didn't ask about how the first meeting went. When Scorpia brought up a transmission and message for the BFF Squad, Catra agreed. "It doesn't really matter. As long as she's here, she's separate from the sword, we're good."

 

"And we're keeping them...forever?"

 

"If the Horde separatists destroy themselves we can release Adora," Catra said. Unspoken, everyone knew that she meant _sure, release Adora, but keep the sword._ "Our best case scenario is that everyone hated everyone and they'll all try to off themselves and use Bright Moon for their petty in-fighting."

Entrapta, at the corner of the room staring at graphs, piped up. "Ah, but our most realistic scenario is that the separatists will use the Princess alliance against us, first. Because we're the biggest target and everyone's common enemy."

 

"Which is why for _now_ having Adora say whatever we need her to say is so important," Catra said. "Since yeah, we have to defuse the situation before any separatists convince the kingdoms to fight us. But the longer this draws on, the less we'll need her."

 

Scorpia frowned at that. One of the best things about the end of the war was that Adora and Catra wouldn't be on opposite sides any more. But it seemed as though Catra was dead set on staying away from Adora -- and yet keeping Adora close enough to watch. After two years, Scorpia knew it was Catra's style with those she liked, this whole arm's length thing, but it was still really, really annoying.

 

//

//

//

 

It was Lonnie who came with dinner. She didn't say anything, just set the tray on the floor and kicked it past the forcefield.

 

"Lonnie, wait!"

 

Lonnie turned again. Adora couldn't see her that closely from the haze of the forcefield but something seemed different. She didn't look very patient, so Adora said the first thing she could think of.

 

"You're taller," Adora said.

 

Lonnie shrugged. "We get older."

 

"And you're a force captain now."

 

"Yup."

 

"... I haven't seen you in months."

 

"Can't say you were missed."

 

"For almost half a year, I wasn't even sure if Catra was alive," Adora said. "She stopped fighting on the front lines."

 

"She _did_ fight on the front lines," Lonnie said. "She just stayed out of sight unless we needed her as a diversion. But you wised up to that, so..."

 

That explained it.

 

Adora caught a faint smile from Lonnie, on the other side of the haze. "You trying to pump me for intel?"

 

"What! Um. No!"

 

"It doesn't matter. Because you're staying here."

 

"And everything is true, about Shadow Weaver and Hordak and..."

 

"Yeah. When Catra had her coup, it was over within a few nights. Kinda hard to lose when the whole power grid depends on the giant crystal in your room, right? Kinda hard to lose when your technical advisor is a princess with an affinity for First Ones tech."

 

Then she scowled, suddenly deep in thought. This time, before Adora could say anything, she left, and Adora knew that calling after her wouldn't get her anywhere.

 

//

//

 

Adora hadn’t wanted to think hard about the news that Hordak and Shadow Weaver were dead. But Lonnie’s brief answer hadn’t explained anything. Who died first? Did Catra really kill them or did she use them to kill each other? She could get the answer from Scorpia, who’d probably feed her the official story. And Adora was sick of being taken for a ride with those. No. She needed to know the truth from Catra. There was that nagging thought that Adora wouldn’t be able to tell if Catra was lying or not, that all these years, she’d never been able to tell, but Adora ignored it. It was still her only chance.

 

And the ward thing. Catra made it sound like there was no real benefit to the Horde for Adora to be cooperative, that it was bigger than just one military force. But it was obviously important enough for her to have Scorpia try to talk to Adora. Being a ward couldn’t be as simple as just taking someone as a guarantee to stop a war. Could it?

 

She missed Queen Angella, or even Castapella. They knew how to explain a situation, break it down. Catra wasn’t obviously going to tell Adora anything unless it was good for the Horde.

 

And her sword. It had been a part of her for two years. The lack of it felt so keen, she wondered if what she felt was what addicts felt, that feeling of withdrawal. It felt like something had been ripped off her back, that a finger was gone. Her hands clenched and unclenched, expecting the hilt and grasping only air. Lying down in bed, she could feel her heart pumping. Everyone here behaved as though she’d be safe with them. Easy for them to say at their home court.

 

//

//

//

 

Over the next few days, Scorpia toured Adora around. The Fright Zone smelled the same; her boots still made the same sound against metal; there were still weird dripping pipes which clearly needed replacing; but some things were different too. Outside the barracks, off-duty guards hung out wearing civilian clothes. Several buildings around the perimeter of the Horde -- including the jail block -- had been abandoned for some reason or another and so everyone was closer to everyone else, and people actually walked the 'streets' rather than using hovercrafts as they transported goods. The amount of activity wasn't all that different but --

 

"Nobody's in formation."

 

And they were loud as they worked, too. That was it. They complained about what they were doing, or yelled at each other. None of the usual military precision, and less taskmasters around. On the sidewalks, people were dismantling parts for broken hovercrafts, or fixing up lights.

 

"They're just transporting stuff, y’know, working."

 

"They're not wearing their blasters."

 

"They're not on guard duty."

 

"What if someone..." Adora drifted off when she realized nobody would attack the Horde. Then she asked herself why, what had led her to that conclusion, and came up with nothing. So to cover up the sudden pause, she said,  "Well, they might not attack now..."

 

Scorpia just hummed in response. What that meant, Adora had no idea.

  


//

//

//

  


The next big change were the screens embedded in the central streets. They were showing tournaments, some clearly based on the CQC training Adora had had, some obstacle course type of show -- and then a game played on a board. The Horde was noisy. Like a town, almost. Close to one of the entrances to the commissary, the guards were betting on a match they were watching on their portables.

 

"Right, I asked Catra if you'd get one."

 

"One what?"

 

"Trapta calls it a 'mobile'. They're what we use to communicate. I tried to tell her our tablets were fine and she was like 'we can do better!' So she reduced the size of it to like, fit in your hand. Well, a regular hand," Scorpia said, pinching and flexing her claws.

 

"What the heck are they watching?"

 

"From the sound, probably the training simulation championships. Senior cadets are on."

 

"Whose idea was that?"

 

"Oh, one of the new force captains asked me about it, and I said yes."

 

Adora realized she'd never asked Scorpia what she was in charge of.

 

"Right, I'm the Chief Operations Officer, but more on internal operations. Trapta is our Chief Science Officer. Catra's just the Commander. She pretty much vetoed Lady or Lord or Queen..."

 

"Kind of like a... triumvirate, huh?"

 

"Yeah, Catra said the same thing! But she’s usually not around. So there's tons of gossip on Horddit about her ‘cuz nobody sees her! I keep telling her to get out of Command HQ and she just sits in front of screens and sulks -- gosh, I’ve never seen someone sulk as hard as her -- Trapta at least, people see her when she's upgrading our systems."

 

"I can't really imagine Catra staying put."

 

"She still works out a lot, that's all she does when she isn't working. She has her own floor for training. Scares the heck out of the clean up crew. They’re convinced she can make herself invisible. They’re convinced Shadow Weaver gave her some kind of magical, supernatural power."

 

The whole idea, in Adora’s head, was ridiculous, but now wasn’t the time to think of that. They’d made it to their destination. Adora recognized the building; it was the training center. Various metal pipes served as walkways between the featureless training center and her own, old barracks, situated on the left.

 

Inside, Scorpia’s voice reverberated. "So we actually shut down some of the halls since we don't have like, 100% of the Horde --"

 

Adora inhaled. That was definitely not the smell of the training hall. They were still in the antechamber, the huge room that broke off into corridors leading to the simulation halls and lockers -- and one of the rooms was different. Some of the corridors were lit; some weren't. This one was, and it was filthier than the other corridors. On closer inspection, the dirt on the ground was soil. Tracks of it, too.  

 

"What is this place?"

 

"That's our garden," Scorpia said. Something in her tone made Adora look at her -- was Scorpia abashed? "Well, we're trying anyway."

 

They walked down the corridor, which opened into the briefing room. Instead of an instructor, an open portal greeted her -- usually those were closed to set up the course -- and for the first time Adora could really see just how huge the Horde's training halls were. "Woah, I had no idea," Adora said, stepping into the hall. The floor was filled with soil and dirt -- would that even work? and the ceiling -- maybe five or so stories high -- had been fitted with yellow lights, strong enough for Adora to feel the heat. On the far end of the hall, kids were playing around. No, they were cadets, Adora observed, and they were soaking each other with blasters that shot water, dashing around shelves and shelves of potted plants and seed beds. But for the most part, the hall was still empty, as though the experiment was still starting out.

 

"Yeah, we turned one of the halls into a warehouse, y'know, cuz they were so big."

 

"Right, we're growing beans, and the rest of the hall isn't used yet because we're still figuring out if we can grow other stuff. We’ll probably take out the floor. And maybe the walls. Wait, " Scorpia said, as though she were thinking as she spoke, “that’s just stupid, right? We should just build it outside, we know, but all the roadwork’s going to be awful for transportation…”

 

Adora looked up to where the beans had been planted, watching the kids shriek at each other as they doused each other in water. She looked around. There was no trainer in the room.

 

"They're unsupervised."

 

"It's fine. They get to have a little break in between chores."

 

Chores.

 

Cadets didn't have chores. They trained all the time and got homework, sure. But labor was something assigned, you didn't do it regularly.

 

"Where'd you guys get ideas for all of this?"

 

"Mostly by observing villages, actually. And uh, pillaging them and taking their farmer's almanacs and libraries and stuff. And uh, maybe capturing village elders and asking them for tips. That was during the war, though. We don't have any prisoners now. Besides, what do you think the average soldier does when we occupy a town? Some of them draw maps, work with the local government, I mean, we can't raze every village to the ground."

 

 _Just most of them, huh?_ But Adora bit back her retort. It was pointless to argue with Scorpia. The woman wasn't evil, but she was at least brainwashed. But she was with Catra now, and Adora didn’t know what to make of it.

 

Adora knelt and poked the dirt. How deep was it? Was this whole thing going to work? The Horde was looking less and less like a military force and more and more like a regular town. The only thing that had stayed the same was the sky. Even the ground would change, if they kept trying to be agriculturally sufficient.

 

//

//

//

 

On days when Adora hadn't tried to make a run for it (she'd tried that only twice, to be fair, and both times Scorpia had completely expected it and wasn’t mad at the least), Scorpia would let her have dinner on the top floor of her building. She’d even give Adora her privacy to stare at the sky. In an hour, someone would come to fetch her. The first time she was left alone, she tried to swing down one cord to the other, remembering another person who could beat the elevators to the ground floor, but she’d just fallen to the balcony about two stories below, where Scorpia knew she'd end up after trying a very predictable escape. Scorpia hadn’t gotten mad, but for that day, didn’t leave her alone -- possibly also because Adora had a very bruised butt.

 

But for the past week Adora had gotten her outbursts under control. She’d given up on trying to rip the walls when she was in her room. Her hands were still antsy, nervous things that sorely, sorely needed anything to hold. Being alone with her thoughts made her jumpy, made her reckless with worry for her friends at Bright Moon. She wondered how they were doing, thinking that she couldn't even tell herself they shared the same stars, at least. Bow and Glimmer had taught her how to read the stars to steer a ship but the fog over the Horde obscured all that.

 

If she kept on thinking about Glimmer and Bow and everyone at home, she wouldn't be able to think. She had to be smart about her situation. She was still in enemy territory, with no way out to escape. If that were the case, then her next move ought to be to survive -- and being locked up in a cell because she was too stubborn would cost her every chance to get back to Bright Moon with intel.

 

 _Just think of it as an undercover mission_.

 

There was one other reason she wanted to stay: she hadn't seen Catra since the first meeting. It had been twelve days ago, at least according to what Scorpia told her. Adora was supposed to have accepted the wardship earlier but Scorpia had been more generous with the timeline and Adora had made the most of it. Not once, however, was Adora allowed into Command, and Catra apparently had turned into some kind of recluse since her takeover.

 

Catra.

 

Had she grown taller, too? Adora hadn't been paying attention, and nearly every time she'd seen Catra, she'd seen the woman through forcefields. Her hair had seemed... shorter, a little, but every recent memory of her her was clouded by thoughts popping up everywhere. On some days Adora wanted to see her, and on others, she wondered what she could even say.

 

_We don’t have to fight. If the war is truly over._

 

And to her shock: _I’m still glad you’re alive._

 

But Adora was sure Catra didn't give a shit for any of it. Had she, Adora, given up on Catra, during the war? Was that even the right way to think about it? Was that even fair to Adora, with all the weight of She-Ra pressing down on her? Fighting halfheartedly for the alliance would mean losing more people. What was the value of a civilian's life weighed against the death of a friendship? And Catra had come to a similar (or more selfish?) conclusion. Personal affairs on the battleground didn't mean much when the war started -- their early tussles, Catra returning the sword -- all of that proof that they still didn't know where they stood with each other in their early days.

 

But things turned brutal the longer the war drew out. Neither of them could afford to talk, though Catra disappeared more and more from the battleground anyway, so the option wasn't there. And truthfully, Adora thought of the scars on her back and wished she didn't want to talk to Catra. The war had swelled in size and destruction and just as the war machine had gotten into full swing, Catra swept in and said: _It's over!_ No treaties or inter-kingdom meetings, either. Just a sudden withdrawal of the Horde. Etheria was still waiting on the next episode with bated breath, untrusting of the situation. Adora had to assess the whole thing as objectively as she could: what was Catra really after? Because after all that death on both sides, surely the notion of peace was meant to be a slap in the face. A bully that said it would stop bullying wouldn’t be enough for the pain to stop -- it wasn’t an apology. Angella for one expected a counterattack. Catra hadn't, after all, agreed to meet with anyone. There was an element of trust missing, or an olive branch.

 

And that was why Adora was here, maybe. Catra was using her to cut the peace process short. No need for tedious discussion. Adora realized with a jolt that Catra would have no need for reparation, either. So it wasn’t just about ‘guaranteeing the peace’. It was that Catra wanted to keep the Horde without having to pay for its war crimes.

 

//

//

//

 

“I just realized something,” Adora said over dinner with Scorpia, trying not to give away that she’d been up since yesterday thinking about peace treaties.

 

“And that is?”

 

“You guys are using me as leverage so you don’t have to do anything to fix what the Horde has destroyed.”

 

Scorpia blinked. Adora pressed on, “I won’t agree to being a ward. I’d rather be a prisoner so you can’t use my… compliance as some kind of token or whatever.”

 

Scorpia groaned. She picked up her mobile. Dialed a number. “Boss, I really need you to talk to her.” Pause. “I don’t know, she’s talking about leverage. She said something about leverage and not fixing what the Horde’s destroyed… yeah, that’s the word, reparations.” She turned to Adora, “Okay, I’m putting her on video.”

 

“Adora,” Catra said, her face coming and out of focus as Catra moved to sit on a broken chair -- was that Hordak’s throne? -- “You’re seriously thinking this is about reparations. You idiot. Why would the Horde make reparations? That’s only for the losing party. We technically don’t owe anyone anything unless they can make us pay.”

 

It was amazing how Catra could make her feel stupid sometimes. Here she was, fighting for her freedom with a sudden negotiation out of nowhere, and that’s what she was thinking?

 

“So your final decision is to remain a prisoner,” Catra said. “Fine.”

 

“No,” Adora said, quickly turning around her next strategy. “It’s still a major symbol for me to accept staying here. There’s a big difference in me being a prisoner and accepting a wardship. I’m still a political pawn. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you use me just like that.”

 

Catra said nothing. Adora took a breath and continued. “Everything I asked from Scorpia is still on the table. And I need to know who killed Shadow Weaver. And how. And same with Hordak. And I don’t want some… I don’t know, some text book or some fake history lesson or whatever you tell everyone!”

 

“Hordak’s death was recorded on a screen and played live as I fought with him,” Catra said in reply. “You have witnesses all around you. And Weaver died trying to suck up energy from the Black Garnet. She was a prisoner, she got out, was jealous of my new position, went straight for the Black Garnet, and failed to figure out that our changes to it would fry her.”

 

“And you had nothing to do with that?”

 

Catra shrugged. “I didn’t tell her to suck energy.”

 

Adora glared, unsatisfied. She didn’t need to say anything. On that last point, she wouldn’t be budged. Catra turned away, as though something out of the frame had gotten her attention. A flicker of light came on, accenting her face. She read something for a moment, then turned to Adora. “I’ll get you a line to Bright Moon every other month, letters every two weeks. And I’ll talk to you in a year, everything you want to know.” She made it sound as though she was being very generous.

 

Adora wasn’t sure if any of this was true. Without thinking, she said, “And we’ll get this all in writing.”

 

Catra blinked as though she were dealing with a child very new to the ways of grownups -- Adora knew that flat expression. “Obviously. We have to send word to every damn kingdom. Look it over tomorrow, we’ll write you what you have to say when we patch a line.”

 

Catra fizzled out into black. Scorpia swooped Adora into a tight, bone crushing hug.

 

“I knew you’d join us!”

 

Adora could only feel that she’d done something very, very wrong.

 

_A year?_

 

//

//

end chapter  
//

//

 

//

 **Adora:** I don’t want The Thing

 **Catra** : Okay you don’t want The Thing

 **Adora:** No I want the Thing

 **Adora:** …

 **Catra:** …

 

This chapter was light on the Catra/Adora stuff but we’re getting there.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3: In which we learn more about how Horde cadets are now evaluated and Catra has to sit through kiddie games just like any other suburban mom. Maybe this should just be a Coach Adora x Soccer Mom Catra fanfic.

//

pride was too much to ask for

//

 

Catra woke up with a gasp. She blinked the dreams away a few times, rubbing her eyes. She patted the mattress around her for a blanket she'd kicked away hours before. In the dark, she could feel her sweat falling on her neck and her hair, matted and mussed. With a wave of her hand, she found her side table and switched on the lamp there.

In the moments between waking up and sleeping, she'd see Shadow Weaver out of the corner of her eyes.

It happened all the time now. Catra called up a screen with a gesture, breathing hard until the audio lulled her heartbeat back to normal. They were nothing more than routine reports from patrols lined with the buzz of static, or hour by hour weather forecasts of the area surrounding the Fright Zone, but they reminded her of where she was.

She laughed to dispel the shadows in her head. "Some Commander of the Horde you are," she murmured to herself. But her voice stayed trapped in her stale room. It was a feeble retort against the rest of the other voices in her head.

_You've kept Adora in the Horde, just like she would._

Catra closed her eyes in pain at the thought. Shit, she thought. No, she wasn't anything like Shadow Weaver.

_Oh, but you are just like me. You're just like Hordak. That's why you win. You don't play fair._

Catra opened the windows by her bed. The night breeze helped. As she’d done so many nights before, she climbed upwards, to the top of Command HQ.

Even as she clawed her way up the face of the HQ, she couldn’t entirely shake off her dreams. She'd seen the glazed stares of other soldiers; she'd heard them screaming. If Catra wasn't careful, she'd end up like them, too crazy for active duty. And then the rumors would say that she'd lost her mind because of the remnants of Shadow Weaver's magic. They'd say that's why she didn't enter Shadow Weaver's room.

To a certain extent, they weren't wrong. There were ghosts, definitely. But they weren't literal ghosts, spirits or whatnot. They were all the memories in her head, that conjured up dreams that wouldn't let her sleep. Finally at the top of Command, Catra jumped over the railing and sat against it. The vast, flat rooftop was the one place she was sure she would be alone.

Catra's mind wandered to the Horde's ward. Of course Adora wouldn’t have any trouble sleeping. Adora couldn't smell the death off of Shadow Weaver's body the way Catra would always be forced to remember, now. Catra was carrying two dead people in her head, and plenty more if she went down that lane. Plenty of people she didn't know, and plenty of people who she did. But Shadow Weaver and Hordak's personalities stood atop all the dead bodies, unwilling to be forgotten.

Adora could sleep. She had enough of that sparkly princess magic to keep the demons off her back. That shining, radiating light that flowed off of her like waves. Adora was always going to be the good guy, and the Sword of Protection was proof of that. Good guys got to sleep. Bad guys got ghosts.

 

//

stranger in a strange land, the land of her birth

//

 

On some days, Adora thought she was splitting into two people. There was She-Ra, ward of the Horde, and Adora, ex-soldier on an undercover mission on Bright Moon's behalf. Or was it the other way around? Was she Adora, ward of the Horde, and She-Ra, champion of Bright Moon? The split wasn't neat, but it was there, and it grew only as the peace of Etheria deepened. Adora realized, after everything sank in, that there was nothing else to do but think, and thinking wasn't her strongest suit.

One thing was clear to her -- that she wasn't herself without her friends, without Bright Moon, without every order from the Alliance she'd followed for the past two years. She'd suddenly been flung into another role and the only thing keeping her tethered to herself were the routines Scorpia let her have: the freedom to wake up early, to train, to eat along with senior cadets (though none of the cadets would sit with her). She was easily the eldest in the training halls; Adora wasn't sure how or when active-duty soldiers drilled, but she was being kept far away from them.

"It's honestly more for your protection," Scorpia said. "Nobody will look twice at you with me walking next to you, but ah, I do have a job. With only your tracking bracelet, you're kind of a target. We'll keep you with the cadets."

"They don't know who I am?"

"Of course they do. But they're scared of you, and scared of getting punished if they try anything on you."

"And the average Horde soldier... of course they hate me."

"As a ward," Scorpia said, more carefully than usual, "you're under our protection. But yeah, let's not test it. Nearly every soldier over eighteen has seen you on the other side."

It was one thing never to have seen her on the battlefield, only to be told to hate what she stood for, and another thing entirely to have lost a platoon member to her. Punishment might have been the worst thing to a cadet, but to a regular soldier, it was an easy price to pay to get back at her. The bitter smile she wore felt alien to her. After all, the Horde wasn't a place where Adora thought she'd reflect on her sins. She was being punished here, and for what? Hadn't she done the right thing? How were they able to make her feel this way?

 _You were supposed to save the world -- did that include the Horde?_ Who got to decide who was at fault, and who would pay? Were the soldiers who fought for Bright Moon good because they were born fighting for the right side? And were all the kids in the Horde evil because they'd been born into a conquering force?

She'd made her choice to leave, and she knew first hand it wasn't a choice anyone else could make. She had hoped it would have been easier for Catra to turn, that she could at least convince her since they were strong together, but she didn't blame the average soldier their inability to leave. _And even in the end, you couldn’t convince Catra._

//

//

//

The training halls allowed her to scream without anyone thinking she was falling apart. That in itself was one of the greatest mercies Scorpia had given her. Every day that she asked herself what good she was in stalemate, in this world without a war, she got to bash out her feelings in outdated simulations of grinning, evil Princesses. Sometimes, alone at night, even after all the pushups, the lap-running, the blade drills, she'd still scream and cry and her heart would gallop in fear, trying to outrun the knowledge that she was an ornament now, and not a tool. Her tears would trickle through her fingers, a sudden sense of weightlessness.

Strangely enough, the fact that she was in an entirely hostile place, that active-duty soldiers would take shots trying to kill her if they could, made her feel better. It was the familiarity of it. And yet as she wasn't attacked, as she was surrounded by children, alien in a world she'd grown up in, she felt despair, having nothing to rail against. Everything was at once a hard wall and a soft pillow that bounced back all the things she knew to do to solve her feelings, her problems.

She couldn't fight her way out of her thoughts, the daily sight of teenagers who she expected to be more disciplined while she also knew that no one should have grown up the way she did. Every contradiction she'd had to face during the war was still here, a daily sight that jarred her, made her feel like she was walking in and out of a dream, awake or asleep.

 _What do you want from these kids,_ she asked herself. Did she want them to be civilians, like what she'd learned kids could be outside the Horde? Did she want them to be better soldiers? But why, and for who?

At least the older crowd knew exactly what they'd do with her if they got their hands on her. And Scorpia knew, and Entrapta, and Catra, and Lonnie... that was, at least, a part of the world she understood. And even if she knew it was fucked up, it was something familiar, something comforting, to know that they hated her. Was it because it was the way things were meant to be? Did that mean that the kids in their sloppy uniforms, unafraid of physical punishment -- did that mean that that was not the way things ought to be?

And she had signed up for this because -- because she had read the situation wrong, or right, or because she could only choose between no freedom and _almost_ no freedom. The transmission line she'd had with Bow and Glimmer, begging her to be strong, was a memory that faded fast against the walls of the Horde.

The thought made her think of Catra and how there would be no negotiation if Catra were Shadow Weaver and Adora was only She-Ra and not the favorite. If Adora were anyone else, she'd have no choice; she'd just be dead. Even with that thought, that she should be grateful, her heart still beat wildly like an animal lost in a forest, surrounded by hunters.

_You're under our protection. But yeah, let's not test it._

She wondered how popular Catra's decision to keep her alive was.

//

//

//

As part of the contract, Adora had a quarterly transmission with Bright Moon. She'd had two calls, so far, the last one just a month before. The whole wardship affair had lasted a day of negotiations between the Alliance and Catra, followed by Adora's speech the next day. Her first transmission, the emotional line taut with relief in one direction and fear on the other, was entirely scripted, which kept her from falling apart. She had to hold it together, especially with Scorpia and Kyle and Lonnie at her back. On the other side were Queen Angella, Mermista, Perfuma, Frosta, Glimmer and Bow. Queen Angella must have said something to her friends, because they too were as stiff as she was, even though they slipped a few words of encouragement. She found herself too tired to cry after all of it, and after a week, the numbness set in and lingered. She was saved, once again, by a reminder from Scorpia that she could write twice a month, as letters were still a more cost-effective and trusted way of communication, as opposed to transmissions carried from the Black Garnet to the Moonstone.

"You'll be reading everything I write, won't you."

"Me or Kyle," Scorpia replied. "Just to make sure you're not giving them detailed plans of our sewer entrances. They're pretty gross, so maybe don't do that."

Her first letter was an assurance she wasn't being mistreated. And it was true: she wasn't being tortured for information. In fact, it sounded like the Horde hardly needed her for what she knew. They needed her for what she represented. It didn't matter that she was Adora, only that she was She-ra. She'd never felt more devalued in her life. Even with the option to write more than one letter a month, she found herself unable to do more than one; days would pass where she'd write something then tear it up. She found that she had nothing to say; asking for help would have been pointless and would jeopardize a political situation, but she couldn't bring herself to lie, either.

//

//

//

Adora had been training for about an hour, going through the levels of the Whispering Woods simulation, when the whole thing crashed. She heard it first, the melting of the sound to a low pitch, followed by the dissolution of the graphics around her -- the leaves, then the trunks, the rocks, the "princesses." Only her baton remained. She spun around, waiting for the simulation to right itself -- this had happened a few times as cadets, usually after a power outage.

This time, however, the simulation had changed to an entirely new map. The ground shook for a moment as platforms of varying heights burst from the ground. A mountain map... perhaps the mountain ranges of Mystacor. Low visibility, firm soil on the lower levels and clay on top. Tree cover wouldn't be as dense as with the Whispering Woods --

In the distance, she heard the harsh break of glass against a baton. Ducking low for cover, Adora went through the bushes as she she searched for the source. Soon she could hear children. She climbed up a tree to surveil.

A team of six had taken over her simulation. They were midlevel cadets, about twelve or eleven. The smallest of them carried the baton with two hands. They were about as uncoordinated as Adora would expect of eleven year olds, bashing a "Titan"-type robot on the legs.

"Go for the head!" Adora shouted.

Five heads turned to face her, while the sixth was picked up by the robot and tossed into the tree. They fell facefirst into the ground, their chestplate beeping to alert their teammates they were short a member.

"That's the traitor," the tallest of the squad said. "Don't listen to her."

From her tree, Adora groaned. The remaining five continued bashing the most armored part of the Titan. They'd scatter when the robot tried to swoop in to take another member, but apart from that, they weren't getting very far. In the distance, Adora heard the telltale creak of shutters opening to let in more critters. If this was a standard level, waves of lower-tiered monsters and threats would come in to help pick the team off. They were on a goddamned mountain simulation. They were supposed to use the trees and the uneven elevation.

"Incoming 9'o clock," Adora shouted, when the first wave of crawlers came in. They were half-assembled humanoid robots that crawled with their arms and shot lasers out of their red eyes. The cadets, out of instinct, snapped up to the northwest. Upon verifying the wave, the leader ordered everyone to scatter.

Adora groaned again. The correct order should have been 'take cover'. The waves were supposed to reinforce the correct strategy to use on the main opponent in the event that the platoon couldn't figure it out. Scattering wasn't enough. Without even having to look, Adora heard the tell-tale _pew pew!_ of the lasers and the beep of two other fallen platoon members.

Oh boy. Within a few minutes, everyone had fallen to the ground, their chestplates marked with glowing x's. Then the simulation ended gracefully. Adora heard a second chorus of _oofs!_ as the simulated elevation reset to default. The platforms retracted sharply into the ground, leaving everyone falling a second time. Adora herself had gracefully jumped off her tree as it dissolved, then jumped a second time before her hexagon-shaped platform disappeared from under her.

"Well," she said, approaching the team, "that was a pretty good try."

The leader had gotten up and dusted herself off. "We don't need anything from a traitor."

"Hey," Adora said irritably. "You guys overwrote my simulation."

"Excuse me," the leader said. "The schedule was empty at this time. It's _always_ empty at this time."

 _Yeah,_ Adora thought. _Because that's my time._

Ah. Adora supposed it made things easier, to keep it unmarked. It would have been pretty awkward if Scorpia had to explain to everyone that they were helping their ward stay battle ready. And they'd chosen the time most kids were out doing 'chores', essentially the free time the kids usually used to goof around at the greenhouse. No kid would normally do training when they weren't required to.

"It's empty because it's mine," Adora said, still unwilling to give up the one thing that had kept her from going mad.

"We didn't want to do this anyway," a boy at her left said.

"Zek, shut up," the leader said irritably.

"But I'd rather hang out with everyone else."

"Ugh! What about Prelims? We're going to get murdered out there if we keep sucking this bad!"

They continued to argue, ignoring Adora. They went on even as they left the training grounds and went back to the lockers. There was some kind of Prelims or Exhibition for the current crop of cadets and they were in the lowest rank. Which was probably the only situation wherein a bunch of kids would do extra work. The bottom five teams of the year would be required to do extra credit for the whole year, so it made sense that they'd rather work their butts off now rather than later.

"Okay, how about we split the two-hour session? You guys get an hour, I get an hour."

Before their leader could complain, the smallest one, who'd used a baton like a staff, said "Please, Cam? And maybe we shouldn’t be training everyday, either, they’re gonna notice."

Their leader sighed. Then glared at Adora. "We'll take over every second half, every other day."

//

//

//

Training sessions felt less terrible after that. Even being told off by a brat that couldn't hold a baton properly was still better than being on her own. Plus, Squad 14 found her old training tapes and would occasionally listen to her when she suggested a different tactic. And it felt good, even, when a bunch of uncoordinated twelve-year-olds managed to beat their first spider or ace an obstacle simulation.

"Prelims is next week," Zek said. She had mostly gotten everyone's names, but his was the easiest to remember. "You should watch us and tell us how to kick ass."

Adora knew it couldn’t last for long, but she said she’d go anyway.

//

//

//

Being 'allowed' to watch Prelims was less of an issue than Adora thought. "You'll have to be escorted," Scorpia said, "But I was gonna go, anyway."

The Prelims turned out to be something like a sporting event that also determined the ranking of every squad. It took place on a large field used during Adora's time for large-scale field and marching drills. It always had some seating, for the occasional ceremony, so Adora guessed it had been repurposed somewhat. The field was flanked on all four sides by barracks and training buildings and some newer structures Adora wasn't sure of. For the younger cadets, the tournaments didn't mean anything permanent or serious, but for the senior cadets, whose graduation had just finished a few months before, it meant determining who got what kind of duty. A lower rank meant having no choice in what branch of the Horde a soldier could join. Most of the higher-ranking soldiers usually joined the Internal Police, while lower ranking cadets wound up patrolling the borders of the Fright Zone. Had the war gone on, being able to choose where one went meant the difference between dying on the field or surviving behind a tactician's screen. But then, that was a problem for the older cadets. For the younger set, winning only meant doing less chores and drills.

 

//

way before the war began

//

 

During the day, it was easy for Catra to function. As long as she kept herself busy, she'd stay sane. Today that meant watching the prelims -- Scorpia and Entrapta had been nagging at her “to make an appearance”, so here she was.

She looked out over the  field, bounded by bleachers, several stories tall. On the far end opposite her was the cadet entrance -- where the teams would start from. Depending on the type of test or course, the kids could either be fighting each other or securing ground or going through an obstacle course, which ended at the ‘front’ of the field, where the upper boxes for senior horde officials -- such as Catra -- watched. One box below her, Force Captains were welcome to watch if they didn’t have any duty during the timeslot.

"Why am I watching this again?" Kiddie training comps weren't her thing. Their grades were very much in flux; what mattered was who they'd be when they graduated.

"Because no one outside of Command seen you for months and the rumors about you get weirder every week."

It should have been funny hearing "weird' come from Entrapta, but the new Horde had been putting out fires and Catra didn’t want to be the reason for yet another issue. Things were complicated enough with the news that some of the separatist “armies” were successfully trading with some towns and kingdoms.

_You’re not here to think about that… focus on the damn internals._

"So what's the latest rumor?"

"That Hordak's spirit has possessed you and that's why you've turned so reclusive and you only show up in screens now."

Wow, that was almost as bad as the last one that Shadow Weaver had trained Catra in dark magic, which allowed her to ambush Hordak. Catra sighed but eased into her seat at the top box. If she had to wave and be paraded around to assure people she wasn’t crazy, she’d do it. She’d hate it, but she’d do it.

"Since when were the Horde such a bunch of superstitious folk, anyway?"

"My hypothesis is, due to the lack of facts and otherworldly nature of your education about princesses, soldiers in the Horde are more likely to fall for logical fallacies such as --"

"Yeah, 'if we don't understand something, it must be due to magic.' Geez. Well, think about it this way, two seconds-in-command tried to murder Hordak, to no one's shock, his latest successor isn't going to risk it."

Even as a less shitty Force Commander than Shadow Weaver (a low bar, really), Catra didn't have everyone's love and adoration, and there were still Force Captains, ones greener than her even, that thought, _hey, someone can kill the Horde Commander, maybe I can too._ Good thing the bulk of active-duty soldiers hadn’t forgotten every battle she’d fought with them. Still, Catra kept her distance -- she didn’t want to show off and fight or engage in whatever dick-measuring contests her lower officers engaged in. Staying away from them was the next best alternative.

"Commander Catra doesn't feel safe in the Horde," Entrapta said, very loudly, into her recorder.

"Do you want to get me assassinated or what?" Any word of weakness would be taken as an open invitation to test her mortality.

 _And you're pretty damn mortal, aren't you..._ she thought to herself.

"No," Entrapta said. "But this is something we need to work on, if you don't feel safe here. We'll think up of something. Improved defenses, maybe."

The thing about Entrapta's guilt was that it made Catra guilty. It was hardly Entrapta's fault that the Horde was just that -- a military operation pretending to be a functioning town or whatever. Being part-time civilians was hard.

"I don't need more defenses," Catra said. "Everyone’s getting used to the new administration. Of course it’ll take some time. It's not something you need to think about."

"But it is a problem," Entrapta said. "And science deals with the solving of problems."

"Entrapta," Catra said, "One day, you're gonna learn, there are plenty of problems you can't fix."

"I know that," Entrapta said. "I just don't want to keep adding problems to that list."

Catra sighed. Entrapta really knew how to make her feel terrible. "Whatever. I'm gonna watch the prelims, people are going to believe I'm still alive, we're going to dispel any rumors that Hordak's possessed me, and I'll go back to Command. Okay?"

"Okay."

After a brief pause, Entrapta spoke again. “Commander,” she said, quietly this time. Catra perked up a little -- Entrapta sounded serious, and she rarely used Catra’s title that way.

“Yeah?”

“I have an observation.

Oh boy.

“You haven’t been sleeping again?”

Damn. Entrapta’s scientific powers of observation usually served Catra well, but not when she pulled a Scorpia and tried to pry. She wondered what gave it away.

“I’m fine.”

“Are your legs...?”

“It’s not my legs, they’re not itchy or anything, geez. Again, it’s not your problem to fix. It’s just work.” When Entrapta tried to speak, Catra cut her off. “Look, let me just get through this, okay?”

Entrapta looked as though she were going to press the matter, but thankfully she only said, “Roger.”

//

//

//

The kids these days were absolute crap at the drills. She wasn't sure if it was because they were nervous, but even just tossing a couple of Robo-Rhinos into an obstacle course was enough to scare the bejeezus out of them. They'd coordinate so poorly that they'd forget the goal and go for the Rhinos. Catra groaned. _No, you idiots. It's an obstacle course! Get to the flag and end the simu_ \-- BEEP. _Okay, that's the last kid, right?_

"Entrapta," Catra said, putting down her binoculars and turning to her right. "Have the Drillmaster lower the difficulty setting for the scripted Battle events." It would be unfair to change them for the current event as about half the cadets had gone through the higher difficulty setting, so Catra had the rest of the events for the day adjusted instead.

"Aye aye," Entrapta said. That was a good sign. When Entrapta agreed with her, that usually meant they came to the same conclusion.

"By the way," Entrapta added, "Adora's here."

Catra's eyebrow shot up. "She is? No, don’t use your laser pointer, dammit."

With some tact, Entrapta put away her laser pointer and instead gave Catra directions. "Fourth row, close to the front..."

That was Adora all right, sitting next to Scorpia. Her hair was down. _She let it grow out..._

"Huh," Catra said. That was something she'd have to ask Scorpia about. Adora’s attendance, not the hair.

//

//

Catra showed up at the eliminations, a month later, as well. At the end of it, Adora had managed to pull up her squad -- squad number 14 -- to a high enough ranking not to be eliminated. "They were the runts of the litter, too," Scorpia said.

"I think receiving extra training from an ex-Force Captain sounds like cheating," Entrapta said.

"I agree with Entrapta on that one," Catra said. "They've already gotten pretty far. How do you know the rest of their batch hasn't figured out they're getting extra training?"

And, kids being kids, how long would it take before the rest of their batch ganged up on them over an unfair advantage?

"You sound like you've already made a decision," Scorpia said. "So just... say it."

Yup, Scorpia was upset. But she would live. Maybe this was Catra's fault for not nipping it as soon as she heard that Adora was giving free lessons. Adora could still throw her a curveball, sometimes.

"Is it possible to move Adora's training schedule to another time? At a time when we know for sure no pesky kids are going to be training?"

"Like, 2 in the morning?"

"If it has to be 2 in the morning," Catra replied with a shrug.

"Is there anything else you... want?"

"I'm thinking," Catra said. After a pause, she added, "You're going to have to tell the kids why Adora won't show up anymore."

//

//

//

Two weeks after that, Squad 14 lost their footing in the formal tournament against other teams. They weren't at the bottom, but it wasn't enough for them to continue to the next round. Adora was still there, watching, along with off-duty Horde soldiers and the rest of the cadet batch that had been eliminated. At the end of the competition, once most of the spectators had left, Catra went down to the field. There was no particular reason behind it, only that it was dinner time and Catra felt relatively alone _and_ free of the constraints of her position -- nobody would be looking for Her Darkness the Horde Commander when dinner came calling.

A breeze toyed with the dust and earth on the field. Above, the floodlights had been dimmed. In another hour, they'd be off and the guards would close the gates. Until then, Catra was going to take a look. The Fright Zone had been built atop the badlands -- most of the soil had been stripped and the ground was infertile. Whatever minerals there were had been stripped by mining operations from the earlier days of the Horde. She hadn’t really gotten involved in the plans to fix the ecosystem -- that was assuming that the Fright Zone hadn’t always been like this. Regardless she okayed whatever Entrapta’s ideas were, and judging from the patches of grass that hadn’t gotten trampled on, they were taking to the new soil fine. About half the field tried to copy actual conditions that the cadets would encounter in the rest of Etheria while the others were metal panels from which platforms could emerge, keeping the conditions of the tests a secret from the cadets. Out of everything Entrapta designed, it was obvious she enjoyed working on this bizarre combination of tech and nature. Like the greenhouse, it was one of the few structures that didn’t smell like oil or grease or something burnt or rotten, which was a welcome change to Catra’s sense of smell.

After walking the length of the field, she made her way to the player’s lockers, opposite the box she’d been watching the comp in. Out of habit, she went for the left-side entrance, the same side as her squad’s lockers in the Training building. As she rounded the room, she caught a blonde sitting on a bench, inside, deep in thought.

Of course Adora would be there. Just when Catra thought she'd have some peace to herself.

She turned to leave.

"Hey Catra," Adora said.

Catra scowled. She was usually quiet enough that not even her Force Captains would notice immediately if she were in a room. But Adora had made the first move. Catra couldn't back down.

She turned around again and went no closer than the threshold between the corridor and the locker room. "Hey Adora," she said.

Adora looked up at her. It was the first time they'd really seen each other in months, maybe in even a year. To Catra, nothing much had changed about Adora's appearance: she was wearing her ponytail this time; she still slouched the same way. But she was, of course, taller and all-around just... bigger. Her shoulders had broadened, and she carried herself with less bravado and more caution. Well, she was sitting across her greatest enemy, unarmed and helpless. That could have been it. Catra preferred the caution on her face, it was less annoying than the bravado, the yelling, the posturing, all of which came with Adora when she held the sword.

When Adora didn't say anything, Catra tossed the next volley. "What, cat got your tongue?"

"I... can't tell if you've grown or not."

"I haven't," Catra replied. "Or so my clothes tell me." After another pause, Catra continued, "Here I thought you'd be angry I took your squad away from you."

"I knew it wasn’t permanent. If we found out that any of our competition was getting any extra help, we'd beat the shit out of them."

"We? You mean me and everyone else. You'd keep your hands clean. Or, you'd try to keep us out of trouble, but we wouldn't listen. Something like that. Then, we'd get into trouble, or more accurately, I'd get into trouble." Catra laughed to keep the bitterness off her back. For a split second, she could still feel the paralyzing buzz of magic wind around her, even if Shadow Weaver could never hurt her again.

_But your mind still remembers._

Catra's ear twitched to will the memory away.

There was another long, pregnant pause between the two of them. Not having a war just made things confusing, Catra thought. Roles were constantly shifting. It was hard to keep straight in her mind that she wasn't here to fight Adora. Harder still to keep at bay were other thoughts, vague imaginings and what-ifs that were pointless and led to nowhere.

"The war's over," Adora said. And, when Catra didn't refute it as a mere stalemate fast enough, Adora pressed on. "We could be friends again."

It was an incredibly naive thing to say, and Catra hated her for being able to say it so easily.

"Oh Adora," Catra said. "What fucked us up went on way before the war began."

Out of patience, her peace totally destroyed, Catra turned and left.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the wider world of post-war Etheria forces the hand of our characters.

//

_the shoe drop_

//

 

Over a year ago

 

_Entrapta poked her head out of her lab. A tendril of hair raised her welding mask for a better field of vision. Down the corridor, officers argued over shower times. From the smell, Entrapta knew they’d travelled a long way from the field. For a few minutes, she waited outside her lab. After a few looks from the soldiers passing by, Entrapta went back inside. It had been an important mission; though Catra usually hit the lab after a mission (always smelling fresh too) she shouldn’t have assumed that Hordak wouldn’t call for her and/or Scorpia, who usually came with. Their best times were usually after a battle; win or lose Catra and Scorpia always had some interesting tidbit, data, or finding about First Ones tech or simply the history of Etheria._

_But still. They’d been deployed a week ago and the purpose of the deployment had been to specifically test her First Ones x Horde crossover cannon. She wanted to hear if it worked against force fields (magical) and walls (mechanical), if the First Ones code played nicely with the payload, if the timer had worked, and so on. There were plenty of moving parts to the cannon, which was why only Catra had clearance and training to use it._

_Entrapta went outside again. This time she asked a passing soldier, “did we win?”_

_The guy gave her a funny look. “No,” he said, before walking away._

_Entrapta couldn’t shake off the look on the soldier’s face. She should have been able to be patient, as Hordak could have asked for Catra’s report first, but after sulking back into her lab and fifteen minutes of failing to concentrate on her welding, she picked up a handset and called Scorpia. After a minute of trying to connect, the darn thing disconnected._

 

_//_

_//_

_//_

 

With a click, Entrapta's recorder started replaying an old log. “The Cannon discharged prematurely,” her voice from more than a year ago intoned. “I have been unable to interview Catra about this. She is not in the medbay. But Scorpia says she’s ‘okay’. Beyond that, she hasn’t been able to tell me. I suspect that she doesn’t want to tell me but I am unable to assess Catra’s condition myself. That is typical of Catra, she hates physical examinations.” The voice went on to record Hordak’s displeasure, the great dip in morale, et cetera, et cetera.

A tendril of hair flicked the off switch with more force than necessary. The whole affair was one of Entrapta’s greatest failures and a major enigma besides. Just as great as the mystery of Catra’s accident -- the most competent operator Entrapta knew -- she also couldn’t name how the whole thing made her feel. She knew she felt “bad” about it, but it was a vague and unhelpful feeling as it hindered her from asking Catra what had really happened on the battlefield. Asking should have been easy; between the three of them, it was a simple fact that they had the good rapport needed to keep the Horde running.

But she didn't ask. For a long time, she filed that under the unknown, things that she couldn't quantify. They would have to stay there until further scientific investigation. At the same time, Entrapta wished she could say something. It was one of the few experiments that were left hanging, without a definite result. And they watched each other's backs, the three of them -- somehow, she got the impression that she was not doing a good job of watching Catra’s back. She wasn’t sure why, and the unknown inside of her grated at her, something that she kept constantly at bay by keeping busy.

On her left a console came to life, the light of the screen pulsing madly. Entrapta turned, flicked a switch, listened to the message, then tapped the intercom.

"Mystacor's under attack," she said.

 

//

//

//

 

Catra replayed the audio-only message Entrapta sent to the Battle Room.

" _'It's the Horde!_ ', wow, really? Damn, I was hoping the separatists would use a different uniform." Catra was irritated she didn't think to change the Horde's look sooner. Anything to distance themselves from the past.

The rest of the room fell silent as more details petered out -- there was something about an Alliance meeting, which gave the assault some context, as it was the chance the separatists needed to take out the most number of princesses with the least number of battles. "Kyle -- send word that we condemn the attack and we have nothing to do with it and would like to request a transmission with Bright Moon at their earliest convenience or whatever. We can't run a transmission between the Black Garnet and the Moonstone without them preparing for it in advance, so the messages have to be sent _now_." Through carrier goddamn pidgeon, too, because Etheria didn’t have radio towers like the Horde did.

He left running after she dismissed him with a wave, the room so silent they could hear his footsteps. Then the doors hissed shut and things were quiet again.

"We don't know which Force Captain is behind this," Catra said, more to herself.

"This has number 6's style all over the place," Scorpia said. "Fighting at night, out of nowhere, quickly: that's Skeletor."

Lonnie: “So that means… his talks with Queen Angella didn’t go very well, huh.”

 _No shit, Lonnie_ , Catra thought but didn’t say. _That was the whole point of letting Adora communicate with Bright Moon._

“Yeah, but he may have been able to get Mystacor’s location through some bad judgement on Angella’s behalf. Or he could have stolen the location while pretending to negotiate.”

"You sure it's not Leech?"

"Leech is probably working under him," Scorpia replied.

Scorpia’s judgement lined up with her own. Catra nodded. "Yeah, Mystacor's not winning that fight. They're all magic there; they don't have a standing army, 'cuz they think their fancy cloaking tricks and shields are enough."

When Catra didn't say anything else, Lonnie finally ran out of patience. "And the plan is?"

"Oh. We're not getting involved."

"I dunno, boss..." Scorpia started to say.

"They'll use Mystacor's geography to their advantage," Entrapta said, tapping a few buttons on the table’s console. A map appeared on the screen at the table. 

"Mystacor is between Bright Moon and the Fright Zone, atop a forest no one can navigate. They'll have trouble keeping it," Catra said. "We should sit and play the long game. Maybe deploy those drones Entrapta tried once."

Lonnie argued back. "They're still halfway to either of us. They could attack Bright Moon or the Horde from Mystacor in a day."

"So we attack them when they leave for Bright Moon."

"... You're assuming their target is Bright Moon." Entrapta tossed her a look. _And you know that's not true._

Lonnie puffed up. "We're the obvious target, they know we're in no shape to really win a fight. I mean, next to them, we suck. They came with Hordak when Hordak first arrived here. After Mystacor, for sure Bright Moon will have fortified itself with the rest of the alliance armies. We don't have that." When nobody had an answer, Lonnie pressed on. "We should have had an alliance. With anyone else. We had six months to shut these guys down. We knew they were trouble."

Catra tried not to roll her eyes. "You need trust for an alliance. We just took She-Ra and forced a stalemate. Nobody, not even more neutral towns, would have bit. Also, there's that little issue that we're literally still the Horde and we're still, as far as anyone is concerned, the reason for most of Etheria's destruction."

"What about... coming to their aid?" And there was Scorpia, always with the compassionate approach.

"That's going to a be a waste of resources. Mystacor is half a day away if we send a company or two, longer if we march the bulk of our army, assuming that the Whispering Woods suddenly likes us. We don't have enough skiffs, we don't have enough air transport. the only way for the Horde to win a battle is to play to our strengths. that means fighting them on our land.

"So we do nothing."

Catra groaned. Now would have been a great time for those drones of Entrapta's that could transmit audio and visual across the damn continent. But no, transmitters didn't grow on trees and Entrapta had been taken up with terraforming and the Whispering Woods would eventually reshuffle, fucking up the relay of data -- which happened the last time they tried. Outside of the cell tower the Horde used to transmit information to mobiles and terminals, there was no easy communication. Again, they returned to the problem of being excluded from the rest of Etheria. Catra couldn't even guarantee that Kyle's message would be received in time by the different kingdoms.

"The fastest thing to do is to send scouts and come back with information." They did have aircraft, one of their exclusive advancements beyond current Etherian tech, not counting the flying horse.

"I'll have the runway set up and air traffic control alerted."

"... What do we tell Adora?"

Dammit, Scorpia. "She's not a part of this conversation," Catra said irritably.

"Maybe she should be. She could know things about Mystacor."

"Adora's a soldier and there's no intel she can give us that will magically solve our distance problem. Unless she can tell me that there are tunnels underneath Etheria, or some kind of teleportation tech that lets non-Princesses travel -- and we know this magic or tech doesn't exist -- she has no tactical value and telling her will do nothing but upset her."

"So if Skeletor does march on the Horde she'll just be kept in her room? Without word?"

"If Skeletor knocks on our door we have plenty of time to brief her. Look, we're going to start a second meeting with the rest of the Force Captains, prep the Fright Zone for high alert, and call for the pilots. Let's get moving and let's not be distracted by... feelings or politics or whatever."

 

//

//

//

 

A scant hour later, a lone scouting plane somehow took off from the Horde. Air traffic control had left the runway open and lit while they sorted out the protocols for actual missions. "Hey, wait!" the operator yelled at the transmitter, "We haven't authorized any flights yet!"

Behind her, Scorpia put a claw on the girl's shoulder. "It's fine. She's flying ahead for us. I'll authorize it."

The operator didn’t question whoever the pilot was.

An hour and a half later, the news finally made it to the Commander herself. Scorpia had been waiting for the call in her own office, where she was picking out who was scouting and who wasn't. "Hi, Catra," she said, tapping the mobile to go on speaker. Scorpia picked up a few papers, as though going through the motions would make the call nothing more than a rote follow up.

"You told her and you let her go."

Scorpia sighed and dropped the papers back to the desk. She sank into her chair and leaned back.

"I did," Scorpia said.

On the other line, she heard something fall and break. "Battle Room One. Now."

The line went dead. Scorpia leaned against her chair and sighed. She dialed another number. "Yeah, she found out already. It's okay," she said into the receiver, getting up and walking out of the room. "I'll take care of it. No, just stay where you are."

 

//

//

//

 

"Wait, what's this about Adora being gone?"

Entrapta moved a step back. She knew she'd hit the wall of their narrow corridor if she kept backing up, and that Lonnie was likely to shove her against it if she didn't answer right away.

"We had to let her go. W-we thought it out, Scorpia and I, and we... came to the conclusion that returning Adora could potentially fastrack the peace process. We need allies, you know we don't have enough manpower or experience to fight."

"Taking Adora was _supposed_ to keep the peace. And we just gave her away? Back to Bright Moon, of all the non-neutral kingdoms to go for? Even Salineas would have been -- "

"The situation has changed! And Bright Moon, yes, because that's where support for Adora is strongest. They’ll trust her."

"Damn!"

Entrapta backed up once more, trying to find a way out. To Lonnie's left was Kyle, who was looking at Lonnie as though she had a clue how to fix this.

"When Catra hears -- "

"She already has. She's --" Entrapta glanced at the door.

Lonnie walked over. "Locked," she murmured. From inside, they all heard a dull thud. Kyle’s eyes darted back and forth the two girls.

"That would likely be Catra," Entrapta said, feeling a sharp stab at her heart that Scorpia had ordered her to stay and wait and that she hadn't said anything, hadn't insisted on joining. She could see Catra banging a fist against the table, yelling, even, but from the other side of the door, almost nothing could be heard. _You did what she asked you to do,_ she thought, _and you're still wondering if it's the wrong thing._

"This is technically treason," Lonnie said.

 _We can't always do what we're told._ Something Catra knew, almost by instinct. Something that Scorpia had picked up from Catra, of all the crazy things to learn from her.

"We had no choice," Entrapta said, remembering Scorpia's reasoning. "Yes, we could have gone and run our plan through the Commander, but we'd risk having her shoot it down and taking too long before we'd do something proactive." And time was a major factor. Adora, especially when Catra had to make decisions about her, was a wild card. Whether or not Catra would have allowed it, the only way to make sure was to go ahead and just do it.

From inside the meeting room, the pneumatic tubes hissed as they pulled apart. The door opened upwards, disappearing into the walls. "Entrapta, get me the jet," Catra said, walking outside. "Scorpia has my orders." Upon seeing Lonnie and Kyle, she said, "get your assignments and we'll disperse the rest of everyone's roles. Entrapta -- we leave the Horde in twenty minutes. And nothing leaves this corridor, dammit. If anyone finds out that letting Adora go was unauthorized --" Catra didn't bother finishing the sentence, still angry as she walked away.

Inside, Scorpia's head was bowed. Entrapta walked in, her hair all frizzy, mirroring how unsure she felt. Did it go well? From the looks of it, it didn't? But Catra said they were leaving... should she tap Scorpia's shoulder? Her hair ended up deciding for her with a rub on Scorpia's back. "It's fine," Scorpia said quietly, looking down at the desk. "She’ll go along with our plan, kind of. But I won't be leaving with the two of you."

 

//

//

//

 

_"You said earlier that there was no trust between us and the rest of Etheria. We need to start somewhere, with a strong enough show of intent. So I thought that returning Adora with intel about Skeletor would be enough proof, would give us enough distance from the separatists. We're all lumped in together, like you said. About the communication issues, Adora's going to be faster than the carrier pigeons that the rest of Etheria use, and there's no way the Alliance can ignore her return."_

_"You’re assuming Adora won't die between here and Bright Moon. Gee, if only there wasn't a warzone that would tempt that martyr-complex-having dipshit."_

_"I have faith in Adora. She knows getting the intel and herself to Bright Moon is what will safeguard us."_

_"Oh yeah, that's another point in favor of 'launch myself into a warzone' for her. You think she wants to safeguard the_ Evil Horde's _future?"_

 _Scorpia met Catra's gaze -- that was her answer. The gaze said:_ Do you really think she doesn't want to?

 _"Y'know, Adora never even finished one actual mission with the Horde," Catra said at last. "No, blind faith isn't going to help us. There are two things going on here. She could go to Bright Moon, follow orders -- we have no guarantee that Angella won't screw Adora -- and us by extension -- over. There's no official carriers, with her, you didn't go by official channels. Angella could take the intel and keep Adora, leaving us with one less bargaining chip. Adora isn't She-Ra, after all. Without the sword she can't do anything, she can't run off and do her own thing. We need to collect her, send a carrier to make sure she makes it to Bright Moon and has enough cover from us. She's_ our _pawn, not theirs. We'd need to make your move official since you've already started to play that hand. When Adora comes in, by herself, without any writing from us, but all the intel we have on Skeletor, that seems suspicious of us as well. Like we're using them. And Angella won't be inclined to risk something based on good faith alone._

 _"The second thing that could go on is that Adora gets sidetracked by Mystacor -- and I'll bet you this_ is _what's going to happen. She'll get herself killed there unless she finds her friends in time. She doesn't have the sword, you put her in a goddamn carrier--"_

_"--with a skiff stowed in it, and some firepower." Scorpia said._

_"So what?" Catra flared up. "It will be the first time on the battlefield that she's at a major disadvantage. And she's spent half a year away from actual combat. Adora's never fought as a regular grunt, foot soldier, whatever. Even with her strength, she's outnumbered and this isn't some fight with robot spiders. This is a battle with the remains of an invading army from another world."_

 

//

//

//

 

Catra was coming with the guard, in her own craft. Entrapta was piloting 

They hadn't been expecting that. Entrapta had theorized that Catra would work with Adora being sent back -- she was good at working with the parameters given to her, she was good at adapting; that in having no choice, she’d be forced to come around, but Entrapta hadn't been expecting that Catra would add weight to the negotiation by coming herself. By taking the last jet, there would be no air support left in the Horde.

"Yeah, but I won't be coming with you two. I'm to make sure nothing goes wrong here." Scorpia said.

Catra making decisions out of anger and pettiness wasn't new, but Scorpia had almost never been on the receiving end of that -- at least, not when it mattered. It was a paper-thin excuse. True, the Horde needed someone who could make command decisions, but Lonnie and the rest of the Force Captains weren't incompetent, especially not when united against a common enemy. And usually Scorpia went with Catra, respecting that Entrapta preferred to stay out of the action.

"Guess I should be glad she didn't have me drawn and quartered, huh?"

And then:

"Are you going to be okay?"

Everyone knew that Entrapta did not fly out on missions. Nor did she brief soldiers. But Entrapta nodded. "This is... far better than we expected, I think. She's making sure that she's behind our plan. That the Horde's coordinated and that the outside kingdoms know that."

 

//

_I wanna get a new look_

//

 

Before they left, Entrapta gave the cadets a set of uniforms. "So this will probably not fit very well," she said, handing clothes out to the pilots in the assembled room, "but please work something out between your teams." How Scorpia made talking to a room full of teenagers easy, Entrapta would never know. She went from row to row, her hair tossing uniforms to everyone, whether they were ready to catch them or not 

"Are these new uniforms?"

"Yes! Scorpia made them way before we, ah -- before this mission. Because we need the rest of the world to know we're not the same faction as the aggressors."

Truthfully Scorpia had drawn the uniforms during a meeting sometime before the coup. But Entrapta remembered in the nick of time that this was not the place to reveal that. These uniforms were black for covert missions. "Right, so, the runway will open up in fifteen minutes. Let's all get to our aircraft by then..." Entrapta trailed off. "Dismiss yourselves once you've traded uniforms?" It seemed that everyone had understood, so she nodded to herself in a room full of teenagers taller than her, and left.

 

//

//

//

 

The ‘jet’ was not a jet at all, but a scouting craft refitted with less heavy metal and a more efficient design on the wings and sides, which made it the fastest in the fleet. Entrapta ran a tendril of hair over the side of the plane, breathing in the smell of oil and grease and chrome, before letting her hair lift her up to the cockpit. As a scouting craft, it had been designed for two pilots side by side, though the autopilot would be enough to cruise through the air after liftoff.

At the pilot’s seat, Entrapta fit then rotated a lug wrench, loosening the control wheel. The original yoke had been intended for Scorpia, made to make it easy for her claws to hold on and steer the ship. Entrapta picked up the spare and adjusted it to fit, then pressed a lever to her side to move the chair closer. Lastly, she flicked a button, paying attention to the traffic control lights above her. The radio operator stammered out the last few checks and commands. She had never had to say them outside of a simulation, and certainly not to one of the highest ranked officials in the Horde.

Catra jumped in with a _whump_ and closed the hatch. Inside, there was about as much space as a tank: enough for two, cramped for four. “Let’s go,” she said.

Out of the corner of her eye, Entrapta noticed the bulk at Catra’s back. Dirt clung to a burlap sack, falling off in bits onto the metal floor of the plane.

“You’re taking the sword?”

Catra unslung the bag, sat on the co-pilot’s chair, and buckled up. “She’ll need it.”

 

//

//

//

 

Throughout the flight, Adora bit back her screaming instinct to run for Mystacor. She had no idea how Skeletor could have bypassed Mystacor’s fields. By the end of the first hour of the trip, after poring over the intel Scorpia had given her to pass to Angella, Adora had also figured out that Mystacor was the ideal target for its geography and its use as the Alliance’s meeting point. Skeletor would only hit that hard if there were enough targets to warrant an attack on a city floating in the sky. That meant Princesses. That meant Bow and Glimmer, for sure, while Angella was too important and would stay (as she always did) protected in Bright Moon. Adora wondered if mother and daughter still fought over being allowed to go on missions. She wondered if news had reached Angella, if Angella regretted indulging her daughter. It was a mom thing, Adora had slowly learned.

Adora stayed on course, telling herself that a figurehead was worth more alive than dead. That Mystacor was worth more conquered rather than destroyed. _And what about everyone else? What about the surrounding towns on the surface, the people under the great lords and ladies of Etheria?_ But Adora couldn’t transform into She-Ra, and she could offer no one any protection only as one Horde soldier against many.

_Still not good for anything outside of She-Ra, huh?_

She heard that thought in Catra’s voice. She’d been hearing that thought, in that voice, through long nights when she couldn’t sleep. The helplessness of it would have, at one point, pushed her to prove herself. But then the stark reality of the past six months was this: that she was only able to do anything for anyone because of various players in the Horde. Even now she was but a messenger in the game the queens and self-styled new rulers were playing.

And her job was nothing more complicated than to stay alive and follow the course Scorpia had laid out. _You can do that, right?_ Again, it was Catra’s voice.

To distract herself from that taunting tone, Adora scanned the scrolls she’d been ordered to deliver. Force Captains one to five were all names she didn’t really recognize, except Lonnie -- Force Captain one. Outside of their names there was nothing else. On the other hand, force captains six to ten formed the bulk of the reports.

 

Force Captain 6: Keldor (Skeletor) -- HOSTILE -- Vanguard

Force Captain 7: Leech -- HOSTILE -- Rear Guard

Force Captain 8: Octavia -- NEUTRAL, LOCATION UNKNOWN -- Artillery

Force Captain 9: Mantenna -- NEUTRAL, LOCATION UNKNOWN -- Engineer Corps

Force Captain 10: Modulok -- NEUTRAL, LOCATION UNKNOWN (SALINEAS?) -- Naval Operations

 

Under each heading was a longer brief. Most of these, Adora suspected, were already things that she’d shared with Bright Moon. After all, she was a Force Captain candidate. It was a gesture, but didn’t compromise the New Horde’s own safety by playing its hand.

 _How soon to Bright Moon?_  

Total run time, according to the readout, was nearing three and a half hours. That left another four hours before she reached her destination, because of the roundabout route Scorpia had drawn up for her.

_“You promise you’ll stay away from Mystacor, okay? The Horde’s depending on you.”_

  _“But Catra doesn’t know about this…”_

_"We’ll tell her after. Then she’ll kind of have to roll with it.”_

_“What you’re doing sounds like something Catra would do,” Adora said, spelling out the irony._

_“Well, y’know, I learn from the best,” Scorpia said, as cheerful as ever. Adora had learned in six months that Scorpia’s good cheer was her armor, tougher than her claws._

_Adora nodded. “I won’t let you down.”_

And who else had she said that to and failed?

_How long are you going to dwell on that? You’re either going to do your job or not._

Adora looked out at the vast darkness of Etheria’s night sky. It was a clear night, but the moon was a pale sliver. It wouldn’t have offered enough light for night marching, making a surprise attack all the more unlikely. It was one of those things those with magic and power would take for granted. If Skeletor knocked the magic out of Mystacor, there would be enough darkness to overwhelm any magic-user. How had Glimmer reacted? Bow? And for sure Perfuma was there too, close enough to Mystacor to make the trip.

A beam of light flashed in front of her. Adora yelped and pulled the yoke up, lifting the nose of the plane. Before she could punch the transmitter to open all frequencies, the speaker rang out: “Identify yourself, Horde soldier.”

Adora’s eyes darted to the screen. It was dark, and in the sea of trees it would not be easy to find who was shooting at her. So how had they found her, when she too was equally as camouflaged?

_You’re running out of time._

Adora opened a transmission. “This is serial number,” she paused, then gave Rogelio’s. “We’re not here to fight. We,  uh, come in peace.”

_Wait, did they find me because of the tracks from the exhaust?_

“Little too late for that,” the voice said. “Can’t let a vessel just come back home blab to everyone where the rest of the Horde’s gone, y’know?”

Even before the operator had finished talking, Adora tilted to the right, evading a set of shots that tracked her through the sky. They’d kept talking to distract her; at least she knew that trick. Adora turned off the receiver and maneuvered again, tilting the plane in the opposite way. She grit her teeth as her stomach dipped at the swerve.

A second volley of shots punctured the night. The whole thing unfolded slowly, partly because the carrier was pathetic at steering, and because the altitude was high enough to give ground turrets a hard time compensating for her every turn. But Adora knew they’d hit her eventually, even if the tracks her exhaust left weren’t too visible. They had spotters and heavy artillery -- _it’s Octavia’s settlement, probably._

Another volley of energy blasts followed after her, one just nicking the tail on her right. Adora winced at the shock of the blast. _Better not forget to be there in one piece_ , she thought, watching the flashing _triangulating enemy position_ on the plane’s screen. It was, like the steering, maddeningly slow. A chime later, the map refreshed with a pointer informing her that they were stationary turrets, based on the origin being the same for every blast. Judging from quarter-circle layout, she’d accidentally found an ex-horde encampment defended likely with a full circle of turrets.

There was no getting past them -- she was too slow, the tradeoff for armor. Adora could either fly north, farther away from Bright Moon, costing more fuel than the tank had; she could go back the way she came; or she could reroute closer to Mystacor, but not too close.

 _Not too close,_ she told herself as she steered the plane southward, watching her plane marker on the map readout crawl, centimeter by centimeter, towards the outside of the enemy’s range. The steady beep of her marker on the map told her she wasn’t out of commission yet, a grim reminder as now-erratic bursts of fire lit up the sky.

_So much for “this route is the safest way to Bright Moon!”_

 

_//_

_//_

_//_

 

An hour alone with Entrapta was enough to cool Catra’s anger. With nothing left to cling to, there was only irritation that smouldered like the dying orange that laid beneath a previous night’s blaze. They had several hours before they’d find out if Adora followed orders or not, and while Catra usually read Adora perfectly, there had been one bet she’d lost with herself: she’d bet that Adora would try to find a way back to her sword while trapped in the Horde, and she hadn’t. Instead she’d taken to her captivity as docilely as Catra had ever seen her. Part of that, Catra could attribute to Scorpia’s way with people. But it wasn’t all Scorpia and the possibility of blowing up at Scorpia over something she was wrong about chipped away at her.

“Entrapta,” Catra said.

Entrapta stopped humming.

“What were you both expecting me to do when I found out about Adora’s absence?”

It wasn’t necessary for her to say, _I knew you two were in cahoots._

“No, we thought... you'd agree to let her go and continue with the scouts.”

“You think me risking my neck leaving the Horde is too much?”

“We know that things are different when it comes to Adora. When it comes to you, and Adora,” Entrapta emphasized the _and_.

"I thought we agreed" -- And here, Catra's voice was quiet -- "to trust each other. Didn't the two of you trust me, to talk to me first about this?"

"...When it comes to Adora, there's almost no negotiating with you."

Catra laughed. It was a hollow laugh.

Entrapta went on talking. "Granted, you're almost never wrong when it comes to her -- but this wasn't about her, and we knew you would want to keep her out of the fighting."

Catra chuckled. "I did say that Scorpia should be the Queen of the Horde. We would have been able to use Adora more, I think. And it would make negotiations so much more official. Proper royalty, someone with a proper runestone..."

"It's... not wrong," Entrapta said, "that you can't, ah, use Adora." Did Entrapta sound nervous? She was almost never nervous, unless it was the nervous excitement that befell her whenever her experiments were carried out. This was something else. "That's why we're here. That's why there are three of us."

"Wrong or right, the only thing that matters is that we're not dead."

Here she was, chasing after Adora again. Now that did sound familiar. It reminded her of Shadow Weaver. Catra exhaled and leaned onto her seat. The lurch she felt in her gut didn't come from being airborne.

 

 _You're going to end up just like us._ Catra felt the ghost of a dead woman's hand on her shoulder.

 

A/N: 

I swear, Adora and Catra will be at the same location at the same time next chapter.

(1) Entrapta's drones are from ch1. I updated the time distances to reflect actual troop movement.

(2) The Horde having aircraft comes from the Princess Prom episode. Guessing that they don’t have fleets and fleets of craft because it would obviously negate the threat of the Whispering Woods.

(3) I find it weird that the Princess Prom invites were by scroll while the Horde has all this high tech stuff (and even aircraft).

 

I have to admit, I am a "let's discuss the content of our hearts" writer and having to write "triangulating enemy positions" took a lot of energy. Also, I am frustrated that I keep telling myself "next chapter, they will talk to each other" and then I'm suddenly sidetracked by plot and stuff. That being said, I hope you guys like the bits with Entrapta and Scorpia.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra and Adora are in the same scene at the same time.

//

scaring you

//

 

Over the horizon, a plume of smoke trailed up into the sky. That was Mystacor, and Adora was nowhere to be found. 

Entrapta filed that bit of data away, then returned to thoughts of her past. Despite the mission that would have  pumped the blood of any new Horde soldier, eager to prove themselves, the tension Entrapta felt from  earlier could only keep for so long. After a few hours, she’d resigned herself to whatever would happen.  She took a long, hard look at the control wheel. The yoke itself was shiny from a lack of use, while the rest of the  control panel had gashes where Scorpia’s claws had fit awkwardly the first few times they tried to fix the jet for her. 

“You were punishing Scorpia when you didn’t let her come with us,” she said, thinking out loud. 

Catra glanced at her direction. She hadn’t also said anything about the column of smoke, the lack of Adora’s ship. “It  makes sense for Scorpia to stay. She runs the Horde, really. And we can’t all be away from the base the way things  are.” 

“It’s true she’s the most well-liked. But that wasn’t the only reason you kept her there. You wanted to deprive her of the  chance to help. You know that’s all she wanted to do.”  _ You were being petty,  _ she thought, but didn’t say. Catra knew that well enough.

Out of the corner of her eye, Entrapta could see Catra’s ears flatten. Usually Catra was better at hiding how she felt  but today was too high-charged. But then again, Entrapta could not place, with certainty, what those ears meant. It  might have been guilt, that amorphous feeling that Entrapta herself grappled with. With nothing else to do, Entrapta  continued. “Scorpia made the right move not to tell you. You would have barred her from doing anything and lose  Mystacor and Adora.” 

Catra cackled. “I lost Adora a long time ago.” 

And as expected -- Catra focused on Adora. 

“Evidence disagrees. She’s even less logical than you. Meaning that her decision to stay as a ward of the Horde was  an emotional one. You would have had some part in that.” Entrapta paused. “Scorpia turned out to be right. What you  did to her was unfair.”

“What, you wanna swap places with her now?” 

“No. I just… wanted to speak for her. But we’re on a mission now. The timing isn’t good, but I’m never good at these  social things.” 

“You could go back to being a regular princess too. Though you’re technically a queen.” 

“You know I won’t,” Entrapta said. 

“You’re annoyed,” Catra said, in a sing-song tone. 

Perhaps she was. Entrapta wasn’t good at identifying her own feelings, sometimes. But she could observe, had been  observing Catra since they met. “Evidence says… you’re also annoyed.” 

Catra snorted. “You didn’t have to take the mission if you were so worried about Scorpia’s feelings.” 

When Catra started saying these things, it meant misdirection; she didn’t want to talk about whatever. She would take,  as Scorpia called them, “pot shots.” But Entrapta weighed their situation, thought about the very real possibility that six  months of work would go up in flames. She thought about the uncertainty of the situation, and spoke.

“I had to take this mission. You asked Scorpia not to tell me my cannon almost killed you so I wouldn’t feel bad about  something I built. Because you knew all I had was my tech. Even when you’re being -- like this, whatever this is -- I  could never not take a mission. Not if you asked.” 

“Oh god. We went through this over a year ago! The cannon firing off was my fault. And you had to make it. You were  under Hordak’s orders.” 

“I was under orders to build whatever I thought would end the war the fastest way. The cannon was still, in the end, my  invention.” 

“Y’know, I don’t even know why you stayed sometimes. I mean, you figured it eventually that they didn’t leave you.” 

“I figured it out eventually that you lied to me, yes. I was wrong that they left me behind and you took advantage of an  unscientific, emotional assumption.” 

“Yeah! You could have walked right back there to Bright Moon and played the whole _I was under duress, they forced_ _me to make stuff and I was lied to_ card. I mean, I did lie to you. That’s classic Catra.” 

“You did lie. But you gave me the Horde. And you thought about how I’d feel about my inventions. You wanted to spare  me.” 

Catra looked ready to murder her if she said another word. Scorpia had been on the receiving end of this look many  times, and Scorpia was still alive. But Entrapta was fast losing her nerve.  

“I suppose, what I’m trying to say is, I won’t leave. And I forgave you a long time ago for lying. And I know Scorpia’s not mad at you either even if you’re lashing out at her.” 

A burst of static thankfully punctured the air. 

“What is it!” Catra yelled, yanking the transmitter off its slot. More static, then finally -- “We found the Ward. And…  what appears to be Force Captain Octavia’s settlement. They know they’ve been discovered. We just barely got out,  and the Ward’s ship is down. Communication is still stable with the She-Ra. She took the transceiver.” 

The first thing Entrapta thought of was the fuel, plus the scrap metal that passed for wings on the scout ships. “Get out  of there,” Catra said. She was likely weighing the same things.

 

// 

// 

// 

 

Catra had a good, long, five-minute-think as they sped through the sky.  Had she been a sharper thinker, she wouldn’t have spent every air resource they had on a guess. She would have  sent scouting craft with enough fuel to cover the trip and kept herself protected in the Horde. Maybe Scorpia should  have gone after all instead of her. God knew she used Scorpia as a shield every damn time when it came to Adora.  Perhaps the problem simply was that Catra could never think when it came to Adora.

But one thing was true, however warped her judgement had gotten -- she’d involved everyone in this mess and it was an unnecessary use of resources. Again, she remembered how hard Shadow Weaver had tried in the beginning, to get Adora back, throwing everyone and everything at a wild goose chase. 

In that moment, Catra felt like a fool. 

“I need your advice,” she said to Entrapta. 

“Yes…?” Entrapta looked at her, apprehensive.  

“What, am I scaring you?” 

“I just said a bunch of strange things, I don’t know what you’re thinking.” 

“Ever since we captured Adora, I always had someone else deal with her.” 

“I didn’t want to see her, either. I don’t know how to talk to her. So -- samesies?” 

That was definitely something Entrapta learned from Scorpia. 

“It seems like someone else has had to pick up after me.” 

“Yes, Scorpia usually picks up after us.” At that point blank fact, hotter than the sickest burn, Catra had to smile. 

“So I was thinking… I’ll take care of tracking Adora and getting her to Bright Moon.” 

As soon as those words tumbled out of her mouth she felt stupid saying them. She looked up at Entrapta. Her  expression was thoughtful. Catra could see her weigh a thousand possible things she could say. “We’re running out of time.” 

“That, and the fuel. We can’t keep changing course looking for her. If you drop me though… I should be able to track  her.” 

“Adora still has the shortwave radio. As long as we have a signal, we should be able to keep in contact until I get  close to Bright Moon.” 

“Right. And I’ll have half the guard make sure you arrive safely.” 

“Half…?” 

“The other half flies back to the Horde for air support and recon. And to update Scorpia that she won the bet.” After a  long pause, Catra added, “I know you don’t do negotiations --” then broke off. 

Entrapta stared at the wheel. Her hair was perfectly still. 

“Let’s consider it a social experiment,” Entrapta said, nodding to no-one in particular. 

“...Thanks,” Catra said. What else could she say? “Let’s get moving then. We need this ship in Bright Moon as soon as possible.” Catra unbuckled the safety straps and opened the hatch. “I’ll see you in thirty or so hours. You better have Angella on our side by then!”

 

// 

// 

//

 

Adora jumped over some roots and bushes, her head swiveling for the light that came pouring out of her headlamp. 

Behind her, the robots struggled to adjust against the irregular terrain. They were cutting a swath through the forest  when they didn’t take a stab at their target with their laser blasts. But, being robots, they were easy to outrun. Adora  only had to get far enough away, ditch the light, and find a tree to hide on. She patted the bag behind her. She still had  everything she’d been told to carry. 

After catching her breath, she kept running, keeping to the densest paths. Noise or not, it didn’t matter as  the robots closed in on their target with thermal sensors. So Adora’s best bet was to use their terrible camera  articulation against them. With any luck, the Horde soldiers who’d found her would catch up soon, maybe see all the  laser blasts or hear the noise, and bail her out. 

_ Did Catra know I was going to screw this up too?  _

That was a useless thought. Adora shook it out of her head and listened. The rustling of branches and the felling on  trees were distant sounds. Looking around, she found herself the tallest, widest tree she could find and started  climbing. At a high enough vantage point, she took off her headlamp and waited. The robots would lead the Horde  soldiers to her. 

She sat and held her breath as the robots were about to make their way past her tree, snapping branches, trampling over moss… surely that would catch someone’s attention.

From a distance, a beam of light hissed below Adora, followed by an explosion. Looking down, a smoking heap was all that remained of the leading robot. Adora jumped from branch to branch, looking to stay out of the way as more blasts of light erupted from deep within the forest.  _ Bkam! _ Another robot exploded. In a few minutes, the robots were all  destroyed by the same distant sniper. For the next few minutes, Adora played a waiting game with her savior. When  the Horde soldier didn’t show themself, she decided to jump down from the trees and take a risk, leaving the backpack  for later retrieval. 

She weaved through the robots, looking for parts or weapons she might be able to use. She was halfway to tearing a  robot arm equipped with a blade, when she heard the rustle of grass behind her. 

“You won’t need that.” 

Adora turned. It was Catra, a rifle slung on her arm, a lantern on her other hand, a pack carried behind her.

She made a little shrug. “Hey, Adora.” 

Adora took a step back. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Adora could feel her heart thump in shock. After all those months of hoping she could see Catra, here she was, like she happened to be strolling by. 

“That was,” she said, fishing for words when none came, “that was some nice shooting.” 

“Nothing a good spotter scope can’t help with,” Catra said, like they did this all the time.

An owl hooted and took flight. Its wings fluttered and fluttered until the sound drifted away. Catra just stood there like  she had all day and night to hang out, like she hadn’t spent six months ignoring Adora’s presence at her kingdom. Her hair was a little shorter than before, Adora realized. It was something she hadn’t noticed before, that brief evening they  met after watching those cadet comps. 

As always, it was Adora left floundering, wondering how to react to Catra.

“I… left the scrolls up there,” Adora said, pointing to the tree, struggling to think of what to say. 

“Then get ‘em.” 

Catra sat on a broken robot’s leg. Adora shut her mouth and played fetch. Above, she took a moment to breathe. Catra was playing it cool, focusing on the mission. She’d probably been flying, for some reason or another. But it wasn’t Adora’s place to ask, and after half a year of being left out of the table, Adora found it easy -- she should have been angrier at herself for this -- she found it easy to accept who had come to fetch her and cart her off to whatever square she was to be on the chessboard. Catra was, in this case, just moving her pieces along.

When she came down, her sword was stuck to the earth, with the scabbard next to it.  

“What is this?” 

“You’d be dead in hostile territory without it.” 

Adora looked at the sword, then back at Catra. Catra raised an eyebrow. 

“It’s not a trick. Obviously.” 

“Obviously,” Adora repeated. “If you wanted me dead, you’d have let the robots do it.” 

“Still got no faith in me, huh.”

Adora took a step backwards, the words a physical blow.  _ I didn’t mean it that way, _ she thought, but that was a stupid,  impulsive response. And she’d lost everything to stupid, impulsive responses.  

“Sorry,” she said. And when she said it, she realized she meant it.

Catra only shrugged again. “We’re walking to Bright Moon. I didn’t want Entrapta wasting fuel looking for you, so --” 

“W--wait. What about the troops from 8?” 

“They won’t stray too far, they can’t risk it. Nobody wants a battle royale, least of all the remaining factions. We’ll worry  about a hunting party when they actually come.” 

Adora thought about that. It made sense. “Roger that.” 

“‘Roger that’?” Catra mimicked. “Not gonna put up a fight and run off to save your friends?”

_ You have the sword _ , Adora thought to herself. And for a brief moment she remembered how it felt when the strength of it flowed into her. But she shook her head.

“... I signed a contract,” Adora said. “I intend to keep it.” 

“Right, sure.” Catra turned, her tail swishing. “Just get the damn sword and let’s move.” 

Adora lifted the sword. It had been months since she’d seen it. She wanted to speak the words, just to feel what it was  like again to be -- well, good enough. Good enough not to need saving. But Catra wasn’t slowing down, wasn’t giving  her any room to breathe in, to feel the heft of her sword. Her fingertips ran through the grooves of the hilt. It was hard  to focus on anything else. All the air had been sucked out of her, or maybe she’d forgotten to breathe. 

“Catra,” she said, feebly. “Wait.” 

Catra, dim in the distance, turned back. Adora finished digging out the sword, holding it aloft. 

“You love that sword, huh,” Catra said, moving back to her. 

“You don’t understand,” Adora said. Her eyes were closed “I need it.” She swung it around.  

How could I have forgotten that sound? The whoosh of the sword cutting through air made her smile. 

Adora opened her eyes. Catra stared back, unimpressed. “You didn’t need it for six months.” 

“I -- the sword is me,” Adora said. 

“I ain’t big on metaphors, princess. What, you live to cut stuff?”  

Adora swallowed. It was one of those things Catra couldn’t understand. She held the hilt of her sword to her chest.  Then she tied the scabbard to her waist and sheathed the sword, pleased at the smoothness of the motion. Like she and her sword were still in sync. 

“Thanks for giving it back.”  

Catra turned and walked away. “Hurry up, loser.”

 

// 

// 

// 

 

For a split second, Catra thought that Adora might turn, might say the words, call attention to them, cut her down. She  had turned her back on She-Ra, and the look on Adora’s face -- drunk with happiness to get the sword back -- wasn’t  a look Catra liked. But the moment passed and Adora walked quietly, though Catra could see her caressing even just  the sling of the scabbard. 

That sword had fucked them up and Adora was holding onto it like she hadn’t been alive the whole time it was taken  from her. She held the sword like it was a lifeline.  

Was this a mistake, she asked herself. She never knew the score when it came to Adora, and the feeling was  maddening, a jolt of hatred or uncertainty so strong Catra’s tail swished for battle.  _ What if we need the sword back _ ,  Catra wondered. Adora had only lost the sword once and as an accident, she’d never been deprived of it for so long. It  was unlikely she was ever going to give it back. And she was less easy to read as She-Ra; in that form, she was the  farthest from the Adora that Catra knew. 

But she was careful not to telegraph anything except for confidence. She was taking the Ward to Bright Moon, nothing  more. And Adora had been quiet so far. 

Catra fished out her transceiver. “Catra to Entrapta,” she said, flicking it on and messing with a dial. “We’re on our way  to Bright Moon.” 

“Great!” Entrapta said, all nervous energy. “We might lose the signal soon. We’re almost there.” 

“It’s fine, we’ll catch up to you tomorrow. Just the usual march. The map’s working, the Whispering Woods  isn’t moving so much today.” 

“Mystacor’s battle may have something to do with that,” Entrapta said. “Just… be careful.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” 

Catra turned the transceiver off with a faint smirk. If nothing else, talking to Entrapta was familiar against everything else that had happened.  Looking behind her, watching Adora stomp through the woods, Catra thought to herself that she’d never had a day like this.

 

// 

//

//

 

After about two hours of marching, they came to a clearing, that turned out to be the beginnings of an abandoned  farm, that turned out to be the edge of a ruined village. Catra inspected her map. It was one of those villages she’d  ordered a raid on after Shadow Weaver’s death. At the time, she only remembered how much food and dry goods  they’d gotten out of it. 

She watched Adora take in their surroundings. Adora, who’d looked anywhere but at her. They’d been quiet for the  whole march, except to complain when a bush or a tree had forced a detour or caused a trip. 

Catra wasn’t about to break the silence. She poked around the windows, sometimes, just to see. The corpses had  been disposed off, probably burned in one of the fields to prevent the spread of disease. Inside the houses, there were  broken chairs and tables, faded bloodstains where families had resisted, cupboards broken and ransacked  clean. Even the blankets off the sofas were nabbed, and all the clothes. 

“So I was thinking,” Adora said, as Catra tore her eyes away from a field of overgrown, rotted pumpkins. “We could  just stay here tonight? Some shelter’s better than nothing.” 

“Not too scared of ghosts?” 

“No.” 

At the eastern tip of the village, a house sat atop a hill. The door had been ripped off. Adora’s boots crunched through  the remaining splinters, as she went in and opened every cabinet that wasn’t already open. 

Catra watched from the living room, setting their lantern on a countertop. “Hey, the Horde soldiers forgot to rip this chest open,” Adora called from inside. 

“You know, I have food,” Catra said. 

A thunk and a creak answered her. Then the clink of pottery. 

“It’s got… corn wine, I think,” Adora said, leaving the kitchen. She stood a table upright, close to a window and  dragged a stool to sit on, leaning against a wall. To her left, what little light the moon gave came through a square  window. And as always, the sword hung from her belt.

“Raiding from your own people?”  

Adora looked at her, then looked at the jug of wine. “I wish you’d quit acting like I hadn’t gone through a war, either. Do  you think I’d last this long if I were that impractical?” 

To that, Catra had no answer but to toss her some jerky and a can of water. 

Adora laughed. It sounded to Catra more like a shocked sound that had been wrenched out of Adora. “This is so  weird,” she said. After setting down the water, she’d gone back to holding onto her sword. 

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Catra said, fishing out a strip of meat from her own pack and chewing. Adora followed. 

“Do you think the battle is over?” 

“Probably.” 

A name fell out of Adora’s lips: “Glimmer.” That damn sparkly girl. 

“Still alive, most likely.” 

“Bow and Castapella.” 

“If they’re caught, you know the Horde won’t let commanders of the opposing army die without making the most  mileage out of it. Something public, a spectacle. We’d hear about it. So I think they’re still alive.” 

Adora gripped the sword tightly. Again, Catra found herself holding back her instinct to fight. Again, the moment  passed and Catra could tell herself that Adora wouldn’t risk it. 

“I know,” Adora said. “Doesn’t make it any easier.” 

Catra took that as a warning. “If you think you’re going to Mystacor --” 

“I’m not,” Adora said, cutting her off. “I’m following your orders.” 

The knuckles on her hand were white with the grip she held her scabbard with. 

“I’ll drag you to Bright Moon if I have to,” Catra said. 

“I know,” Adora said. Then there was that laugh, again. “That sounds so crazy. The leader of the Horde, threatening to  drag me to my headquarters!” 

This Adora, with her sword, and out on the field, was a far cry from the one that had quietly sat in the Horde for the  past six months. Catra reined in her sudden desire to speak, to say something. There was Adora right in front of her, in  as peaceful a situation as it got for both of them.  

Peaceful? 

The word rolled around in Catra’s mind. The Horde was full of kids. The Horde was a potential target of some of  the best veterans from Hordak’s world. Adora’s friends were captives, if they weren’t dead or on the run for their lives. 

And Adora was in front of her, contemplating the wine. 

No wonder Adora had laughed. 

“Do you actually drink now?” 

“I can take first watch,” Adora said, instead. 

“Drunk?”

“Of course not.”

“Hmph. You’d make a shit night watch, there’s almost no light from the moon.”

“You’ve had just as long a day as I have.”

_ Are we seriously fighting over who ‘gets’ to have the first watch? It’ll be dawn soon. _

“This is stupid,” Catra said. “It’s a waste of resources if both of us stay awake.”

“I can’t sleep, anyway,” Adora said.

“Then drink that crap and shut up.”

Adora shut up. She did not drink. She closed her eyes instead. “Wake me in… two hours?”

Catra planned to wake her up in three and have them continue the march. She nodded, anyway.

 

//

buddy-buddy with the grim reaper

//

 

Shortly after dawn, Catra went from a light doze to a sudden wakefulness. She felt it first, rather than heard: a distant rumble, like a tank hadn’t learned its lesson and was trying to bulldoze its way through the forest.

“Adora,” Catra said, peeking out through the window. The hill was an excellent vantage point, one of the reasons they’d chosen it. Next to her, she heard Adora stir and wake up.

“Do you hear that?”

The tank, or whatever, had stopped moving. But now Catra could hear motors. Beside her, Adora was collecting their things.

“They’ll find us if we move now,” she said. “Let’s just wait it out, they won’t pick at a grave.”

So they waited -- until they heard screaming and gunshots. Adora beat Catra to the window -- “Looks like two rebellion guards,” she said. “And a hunting party.”

Men on motorcycles aimed and shot. One of the rebellion guards fell. The motorcycles caught up to him easily, running him over a few times. The rest circled the remaining man, whose arms were up, whose knees were on the ground.

If Adora gripped that sword any harder, Catra thought, she’d break a knuckle. She watched the soldiers cuff the man on his knees, then looked askance at the roadkill.

_ They want this specific guard for a reason _ . 

The other man was expendable, whereas the other warranted a chase through the Whispering Woods.

She picked up her rifle and scope. “Adora,” she said, setting everything up, “That sword shoots lasers, right?”

Adora looked at her, confused at first, before a slow, relieved smile spread across her face. “Of course it does.”

Catra nodded and focused on the scope.

And then Adora said the words, loud enough to distract the soldiers from Catra’s first shot. The brief light that engulfed Adora provided enough cover for a couple more, before Catra’s rifle ran out of power. By then, She-Ra had jumped the distance down from the hill, scattering the remaining hunting party. “Fuck it,” Catra muttered to herself, before tearing down the hill herself.

 

//

//

//

 

The fight was brief. After realizing who it was they were up against, the rest of the party started to run.

_ No way you’ll be telling Skeletor she’s back,  _ Catra thought, pulling out a throwing star from her belt and flicking it. It found its mark at the back of a retreating Horde soldier. Still another was disappearing through a rotting field -- Catra picked up a rifle still warm from use and aimed.

“Catra!”

From her left, Adora tackled her, just as a searing warmth tore through her calf. They fell in a heap, face down. Then she heard the whir of a sword swung into the air and a thud a small distance away as it buried itself into a body.

“There’s another one,” Catra hacked out, her throat dry as she tried to roll over. She could feel the blood running down her leg. “The field.” Adora picked up the rifle beneath them. Catra heard Adora take the shot as she carefully sat up, focusing on the red dot just above her knee. The metallic smell annoyed her.

Lucky bastard, whoever that was.

As she felt Adora hover over her, she said,  “You sure they’re dead?”

“Yeah.”

Catra nodded to herself. “They shot the guy, didn’t they? Better check if he has any last words he wants to say to you.”

Dammit, why did she have to go and get herself injured? The pain was irritating more than actually painful.

“I can bandage myself,” Catra snapped as she felt Adora hesitate. She looked up, knowing full well that the look on Adora’s face would piss her off more. “Okay, fine,” Adora said.

_ What a mess _ , Catra thought to herself, scanning the battlefield. Bodies and motorcycles everywhere, and a few backup robots destroyed. Less than ten meters away, the guard that had taken the lucky shot lay still with a sword lodged into his chest. There was no real need for Adora to collect the sword right away. 

Catra pressed around her wound. The good thing -- if it could be called that -- about lasers was that the wounds were generally clean -- no chance of shrapnel getting embedded in the skin. She just needed something to disinfect with. She felt around her belt for the bandages and some healing gel.

Adora came back with last night’s wine and much thicker cloth. Catra, still sitting in the middle of the road, took the wine and poured everything over her leg. The pain, she allowed, was a little more than annoying.

“You sure you don’t want me to do that?” Adora said, when Catra started cutting the cloth around her legs. 

“What did that dead guy say?”

“He had a crystal on him,” Adora said, showing her.

“Great. Go pick up cartridges or something, my rifle’s spent.”

“Catra, please --”

Catra glared at her. She was still in her She-Ra form. When she wasn’t in battle, She-Ra didn’t look that far off from Adora, just older.

“I’ll be fine,” Catra snapped.

 

//

//

//

 

Adora reloaded Catra’s rifle, piled all the bodies and remaining rifles together at the back of a large house, then overloaded the rifles. In a few hours, the bodies would all be ash. The motorcycles, Adora hid in various houses. Anyone taking longer than a passing gaze through the village would notice, but automated scouting bots probably wouldn’t find anything. Catra meanwhile made herself a tourniquet and pulled out a telescopic staff, again from her handy belt. She’d hobbled over to a tree stump, occasionally thumbing the transceiver in her pocket, wishing she could scream at herself for being careless or at least tell someone, Scorpia or Entrapta.

“Are you done yet, princess?” She yelled, even if she wasn’t helping at all.

“Done,” Adora said, jogging back to her, that damn sword swinging at her waist again. She’d turned back to her usual self already. There they stood, Catra sitting on the stump, holding onto her god damn staff-turned-cane, and Adora, not looking a moment worse for wear, as though she hadn’t gone through a fight.

It was the most maddening thing in the world that they were half a day away from Bright Moon and Catra’d gotten herself shot. She felt for the dead man's crystal tucked in one of her belt’s pockets and nodded.

“Then let’s get going.”

“I think we should take a motorcycle,” Adora said, head tilted back to the last one leaning against a house whose door had been knocked down. It was an off-road model, almost good enough to take on the Whispering Woods as long as the trees didn't shift too much.

“Too loud.”

It was quiet between them for a while. Then:

“Will you let me carry you?”

Catra rolled her eyes. “Don’t be stupid. I can walk.”

“I know that, but I’d rather you don’t while we go to Bright Moon. It’ll heal faster that way.”

Again, there was that pause between the two of them. 

It occurred to Catra that they’d have fought by now, if they were younger, but Adora was holding herself back, trying to get a feel for when to push and when to let go. 

Catra inhaled. From her bandages, she could still smell the blood drying, the smell of her carelessness.

“We’ll take the bikes,” she conceded. It felt like losing, somehow.  _You should know better than to let her do anything for you,_ she thought to herself. But Bright Moon was not too far off, especially not with a bike, and she wanted to get out of this too, this weird zone where she and Adora weren't killing each other.

 

 

//

//

//

 

A/N: My apologies for the lateness, a sudden foreign work trip has taken up most of my free time this April. Cheers y'all. Hope there weren't too many abrupt or weird typos here!!

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hasty plans are made

**stay in your lane**

They arrived at Bright Moon just after lunch and were taken straight to the grand hall. Along the way Catra’s guard rejoined their leader. There was a brief hug between Entrapta and Catra (Entrapta initiating, Catra grudgingly accepting) and a short question in jest, “So is she on our side yet?” which Entrapta only answered with a look.

The posse was mostly for show, but reminded Adora that though she was technically home at last, Catra was in hostile territory. At the grand hall, Catra made no mention of her injury until Entrapta pointed it out, but deferred to be treated until she’d spoken to Queen Angella first. The Queen passed the ball back by politely declining to meet until the evening due to local affairs already scheduled for the day and offering the company of healers from Perfuma’s kingdom in the meantime. For a second, it seemed that Catra was going to press the meeting, but she acquiesced instead. Adora was spoken to as stiffly as the rest of the Horde but was instructed to be taken to her room to rest a little.

Bright Moon itself felt unreal, as though the ground might give way at any time, as though Adora’s own senses were transmitting every last detail through a screen, from far away. This should have been her home, she should have been triumphantly walking back to her liege, but instead the brief talk with the Queen had her feeling unsettled.

_You walked in with Catra, at a time when your best friend has been captured by ex-Horde soldiers._

_Glimmer is all the blood family she has left. And Castapella is King Micah’s sister..._

All of that threatened to be swallowed by her memory of Catra in the morning, sitting behind her, hands on the handlebars between them. It was a crazy thought, compounded by the ridiculousness of their situation and the battle they’d just been through, but for a second, Adora wished they were friends simply arguing about who got to drive the bike.

The thought was useless and invasive. She was tiptoeing between world powers, in a reprieve in the middle of two battles. The Queen should have been her focus, reassuring her that she, Adora, was still as loyal to Brightmoon as she always was. Otherwise Catra’s argument for an alliance stood on shaky ground. The Queen might agree to it, but purely out of necessity -- there would be no trust. And currently, the Queen had no advisors who knew the Horde like she did.

If only Catra could see her now, thinking smart about it. Smart _ly_ , Adora corrected herself.

Her room, six months unused, had that unlived smell already. There were pictures of the three of them that Adora didn’t remember placing on the vanity -- that must have been Bow’s doing. She could see the two of them here, arguing over what happened to her, beating themselves up needlessly for it, probably wondering how she was, if she’d been brainwashed, if she’d been forced to write letters to them -- those were the kinds of thoughts Glimmer would have, Adora was sure.

_You’re sulking_ , she thought to herself.  _Catra wouldn’t sulk. She’d lick her wounds and know that fighting injured was pointless._

Catra had already made it this far to throw her weight behind the chance of an alliance.

Adora glanced to the bed, where the guards had left her clothes and toiletries. If there was one thing she learned from Glimmer and her time in Bright Moon -- she had a part to play, and dressing for it made a difference.

She had to believe they were alright, because she wouldn’t be able to move forward otherwise. As Catra had said -- it was tactical to keep them alive, and killing them would have been an emotional and wasteful move.

//

//

//

Adora made to bow, but the Queen stilled her with a raised hand.

“I heard the details of your mission through the Whispering Woods from the Horde attache. It appears they have the latest intel in the form of a crystal from a guardsman of Mystacor.”

“That is correct, Your Majesty. It was a hunting party -- that’s a Horde unit, about twenty or thirty soldiers, usually. We were aiming to keep a low profile, but not when we saw that they were on the chase. We chose to intervene, but we were too late.”

It went unspoken between them that Adora had not plucked the crystal for Bright Moon, but allowed it to be used as a point of negotiation in the Horde’s favor.

Queen Angella leaned against her chair. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine, the hunting party wasn’t really a threat, but we --” Adora stopped talking when the Queen raised her hand again.

“Adora, my daughter was sick with worry ever since you were taken from us. And now --”

_Now_  hung between them, taut with tension.

Adora heard the words as though they were from far away. She felt the tug between past lives and present situations.

“I’m… alive,” Adora said. And, tripping over the fact that she was on a tightrope between two world powers, she added, “I am ready to fight for Bright Moon.”

That softened Queen Angella’s face. “You have always come to our aid when we need it.”

It seemed the words leapt through the distance in time and the afternoon’s events. Adora would have pressed her advantage, advised that they take the help the Horde was offering, but she said nothing, halted by something in Queen Angella’s expression.

“I am glad you survived your time in the Horde.”

Unsure of where this was going, Adora could only be honest. “It’s not like the Horde even treats its soldiers great to begin with, but well, things are different now -- I was treated fairly. It wasn’t like -- they shoved me in a cell and tossed the key or, or that they made me say things in my letters or when we had transmissions… I hope I’m not giving you ideas,” Adora said, stuttering slightly.

“Nothing Glimmer hadn’t already thought of,” the Queen said. “If she were here, she’d be convinced you were brainwashed.” Before Adora could refute that, Angella continued, “It feels as though things are happening much too quickly for my liking,” Angella said. “I am grateful that you stand with us, She-Ra, but the gift of your safe return comes with a contract I did not sign at a time that seems too convenient for the Horde to drop in and make an offer. ”

“My Queen,” Adora said, slowly, “the Horde only came to deliver me and send their help. The Horde is not our enemy.” That sounded ridiculous considering her own position. “The past half year of peace wasn’t something that came out of nowhere.”

“No indeed,” the Queen said drily, “it cost us our She-Ra.”

Adora could almost hear the doubt that she’d returned fully to them, though the Queen said nothing else to that end.

“If we refuse the Horde’s offer, you will not return with them?”

“Of course not,” Adora said. “I fight for the Princess Alliance, not for the Horde.”

“You swear it?”

What was there to swear that she had not sworn or proven ten times before?

“I fight for the Princess Alliance,” she repeated. “I won’t rest until we have Glimmer and Bow safe in Bright Moon, and all the other princesses safe, and Mystacor restored to Castapella. I swear it.”

“And you will follow me and my army’s orders?”

“I will.” And then Adora thought of Catra, and realized that once Catra had formally ceded Adora to Bright Moon, Queen Angella could easily order an attack on the Horde, too… but only if she worked with the Horde to take down Skeletor, as the Horde’s forces would be considerably weaker than the Alliance’s after dealing with Skeletor.

It was an ugly thought, and Adora had never had thoughts like this, doubts of the rebellion, of Bright Moon. Now, of all times, when the Queen’s only daughter was likely captured -- Adora hated herself for thinking it.

_But you don’t know what they’re thinking,_  she heard Catra say in her head.  _How do you know the Horde is any different to them?_

“Yes, your Majesty,” Adora said, figuring out the rest of what she hadn’t caught. “They came bearing intel better than what I could supply. I know Keldor -- he calls himself Skeletor now. He has years of guerrilla-style fighting under his belt. He’s not going to go down easily. Large scale battles don’t mean much against him, he’ll have his forces scatter and regroup. But I don’t know everything about his force, whereas the ex-Horde factions couldn’t leave without Catra knowing who and what left. Negotiating with the Horde will nip his quest to power in the bud.”

“Then we will see the Horde Queen tonight,” Queen Angella said.

“Your Majesty,” Adora said, to soften her incoming correction, “Catra isn’t the Queen. They’re a triumvirate.”

“Perhaps that is the law of the Horde,” Queen Angella said, “but by our laws, she has recognition as ruler of a dominion. Her people follow her, her territory is clearly marked. Perhaps she and the two princesses do share rulership, but Catra -- whether Queen or Commander -- carries the final word. In Etherian peerage, that makes her a Queen. Otherwise I wouldn’t be negotiating with her.” There was a hint of a smile on her face, as though that little interaction reminded her of how Adora had, in the past, failed to understand the most basic things about Etheria.

Dismissed, Adora wondered what else she hadn’t understood.

//

//

//

Adora slept the rest of the afternoon away in the stables, after looking for Swift Wind. When she couldn’t find him she went to the hay loft and, basking in the sun’s rays framed by the window, fell asleep against a bale of hay.

When she woke up, it was dark and still outside. She leapt up immediately and found that the ladder had already been removed. The day was done.  _Oh shit._

She had just bolted out of the stables after a jump down to the first floor when she heard Catra’s voice. She turned. Behind her, Catra was sitting on a bench.

“You missed the fun part,” Catra said, her tail dipping low at the water trough next to her. Occasionally, her tail would flick, spraying water around in restlessness.

She was dressed in her usual deep red, plus the half-cape Adora still wasn’t used to. Adora’s eyes drifted to Catra’s legs: there was no sign Catra had ever been injured. “Geez Adora, relax. The Queen suggested to let you rest after your, hmm, ordeal. That’s what she called it.”

Adora should have been angrier that she’d been left out of the negotiating table once again, but she couldn't summon the energy. Despite her sleep, she was still drained by the situation, the split in her head that being in Bright Moon brought to the fore.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” Catra repeated. “Do you even want to know what’s happening?”

Exasperated, Adora replied, “Well sure, if you want to tell me.”

“So Skeletor sent an exploding robot messenger bird this evening,” Catra said, “That was new. He has Glimmer, Castapella, and Frosta as well as all the mages as hostages in Mystacor. No other princesses were in Mystacor, luckily; Perfuma is here and Mermista is guarding her home kingdom. There was no news about Bow, so we’re working under the assumption he got away.”

“What does Skeletor want?”

“He wants control of the Horde -- he’s probably sent a bird to Scorpia -- and he wants control over Bright Moon, otherwise he’ll murder the princess and all the other members of the nobility in a fortnight. Not exactly the most imaginative plan in the world.”

“And he expects us to just… fork over Bright Moon and the Horde at the same time?”

“He pointed out that Mystacor offers an excellent vantage point and that we’d have trouble taking it by foot. He’s not wrong. Also, if we move the entire Bright Moon army, he’ll know right away, and then it’ll be ‘bye bye, heir to Bright Moon.’

“That’s where the Crystal comes in -- turns out, Skeletor found out where Mystacor was by mapping the food supply routes of neighboring villages. His people pretended to be travellers around the villages close to the Whispering Woods. Once they finished mapping out some anchor points around the Whispering Woods, Skeletor dropped the talks and disappeared for a while. He took advantage of the rebuilding we had to do after the war, basically.

“If we start a battle now he kills Glimmer and Castapella before we even get there.”

“So a covert mission, then.”

“Yes.”

And, knowing that Bright Moon sucked at cover missions, Adora said, “You’re heading the mission.”

“Obviously.”

As though someone had lit a candle in a dark room, Adora understood. All Bright Moon had to do during negotiations was promise not to attack the Horde after or if they beat Skeletor. Catra couldn’t fail to fetch Glimmer; the Horde would suffer the most for it. At the same time, it wasn’t likely that Bright Moon would entrust the Horde to fetch their princess, so Catra would be saddled with a mix of Bright Moon soldiers and Horde operatives, neither of whom had much trust in the other.

“Bright Moon will lift the firewall around the Black Garnet,” Catra said. “So we’ll be coordinating in fairly real-time conditions with the Horde. That was Bright Moon’s big concession. It  _is_  her only kid, after all.”

“And my closest friend.”

“Yeah, that too. We already knew you’d frothing at the bit to join. Angella wouldn’t agree unless she was sure someone would keep her darling daughter safe. Guess you’re the knight in shining armor, huh?”

What did Catra want her to say? Adora didn’t bite. She only said, “When are we moving out?”

“A small, small part of Bright Moon’s host is already moving quietly to protect the villages around Mystacor. The order to leave was given as soon as the negotiations were over, because of the intel the crystal provided. It’s no more than thirty soldiers distributed to two villages, going undercover at different times in groups of four.”

“A fireteam,” Adora said.

“Did you contribute that division type to their military?”

“I told them as much as I could about our military divisions when I joined the Alliance.”

“Well, that should make leading easier.”

“So your guard and…?”

“Whoever feels like joining up,” Catra said sarcastically. “They’re still fighting over who gets the honor to join you. And then you can expect a huge welcome back dinner tomorrow, as though Skeletor won’t have eyes and ears for this sort of posturing.”

“I’ll talk to them,” Adora said. “Do you think Skeletor knows about us?”

“I told your Queen I estimate a week before Skeletor figures things out and changes his tactics,” Catra said. “She agreed. So after your party or dinner or whatever, we’ll move to position. We’re getting reinforcements from the Horde, too. Some kids on recon/spy duty around Mystacor; I’ll be coordinating with Scorpia tomorrow.”

“Everything sounds like it’s been decided,” Adora said.

“Pretty much. It’s three in the morning, what do you expect?”

“Shit,” Adora murmured. Again, there was that feeling of being moved around and told when to swing her sword -- out of reflex, she touched the hilt -- and again, there was only a resignation to her reality. She was going to lead Bright Moon’s team, and Catra was going to lead the Horde’s; she was back to serving the Alliance today. Tomorrow, for all she knew, she’d be bartered for something or told of some other mission. Catra, sitting in front of her, arms crossed, would never have stood for it.

But then they were always opposites.

“Are you waiting for me to dismiss you or something?”

“Uh, no. I’m going back to the castle.”

“You do that.”

“... Are you just going to stay here?”

“Bright Moon Castle sucks. Everything smells too good or perfumed or magicked. It smells more honest outside. But I really shouldn’t be badmouthing my gracious host.”

Adora gave Catra a long look. There was still that question that lay unanswered in her mind. Everything else -- Bow, Glimmer, the war -- all of them would be resolved in a few days. She could cope with the anxiety before a mission, the low, humming, ever-present fear of death or loss that she had to face every time for years now. She was trained for that, after all.

She did not train to ask her ex-friend how the woman who raised them died.

_How did Shadow Weaver die? Was it really you who killed her?_  Was now the right time to ask that question, though? And If not now, then when?

//

//

//

**buddy-buddy with the grim reaper, part 2**

The welcome party had been whittled down to a typical castle dinner with soldiers for the mission from both sides at the seats of honor, at the front of the hall. There were no decorations, no special toasts, no announcements. Netossa had approved of the idea, as it was the closest to team bonding they’d have given the fragile alliance and was fittingly not too ostentatious. The Horde attache, not even as old as Adora, took the news that morning with a grave face and a solemn assurance that everyone in Catra’s guard would be present and on time.

(“He probably thought the whole thing was some kind of initiation rite,” Catra said, on hearing the news.)

And on time they were, on their best behavior, taking cues their Commander and Chief of Science. When neither Catra nor Entrapta touched the wine, none of the Horde kids did. Whatever Catra and Entrapta ate, they ate. When Catra made small talk with Netossa, they tried to fall in conversation with the Bright Moon soldiers across them, mostly about the food, the weather, and never about the specifics of the mission. The Bright Moon bunch were older; it looked almost like a class having dinner with their instructors. Both sides were equally divided on every table.

"This has to be the stiffest 'get to know you' I've seen in a while," Netossa muttered to Adora. She at least treated Adora no less differently than before.

"I'd say it's a tie with Princess Frosta's attache, when they started out with the Princess Alliance."

That earned Adora Netossa's laugh. "Yeah, minus the part where we have to go on a life or death mission with people we barely know."

"Well," Adora said, not really thinking, "we get used it."

Netossa raised an eyebrow at that. "Oh boy, the Horde's done a number on ya, haven't they, kid?"

"Didn't mean to sound like such a downer," Adora mumbled.

"It  _is_  a depressing state of affairs though," Netossa said. "One bad guy dies, another one takes their place."

Adora could only drink in reply. Whenever she got morose, either Bow or Glimmer would say  _something_. At first they weren't always the right things to say, but they got better at figuring her out, cheering her up. Adora took another sip as she thought of how wrong it was to be in Bright Moon without either of them. The wine turned sour and dry at that thought.

"Okay, that's enough misery," Netossa said, standing up. "I'm going to ask some of those Horde guards to play darts or something, we need to break the ice. Why don't you ask the ex-Princess the same?"

"Entrapta?" And they both turned to check up on her. Entrapta had moved from her chair to sit next to some Bright Moon guard and was writing furiously on her tablet. The guy she was sitting next to was gamely drinking whatever concoction she had made and answering all her questions. Adora could not tell if his ruddy face was from drinking or whatever Entrapta had added  _to_  the wine.

Having witnessed that, Netossa found another option. "There's the Horde Commander herself, if you can convince her to play."

The last thing Adora wanted to do was talk to Catra, who was deep in conversation anyway with the commander of her Guard. Netossa must have seen something on her face, because she only sighed and conceded. "Well, I'll go play darts with her then," she said. "Take one for the team and all that."

She stood and her walk changed to that of an officer with intent. Adora watched as she joined in on the conversation Catra was having. So far, no murderous looks yet. But why would there be? They were just having a conversation about the mission.

Before Adora knew it, Catra had walked across the room to throw darts. There were scrapes of chairs across the ground as everyone got up to crowd and watch. Adora had no view at all, but kept herself. It landed pretty close to the center, or so Adora guessed judging from the Horde cheer. Adora hadn't realized she'd held her breath till her long sigh of relief.

_Let them sort it out,_  she thought to herself as she stared at her cup. There was too much going on in her head and  _really, the wine should be doing a better job of dulling it..._

With that thought, Adora got up and left the dining hall. Her feet took her outside until she reached the grazing grounds of the horses. She sat on a bench and leaned against a fence.

She recalled a vague memory, more than a year ago, of leaving another Bright Moon dinner party early. She hadn't told anyone, but Glimmer knew right away. And without having to be told, she went after Adora, and Adora hadn't even known she'd wanted company until Glimmer joined her. Not necessarily to speak, but just to be there sitting on the grass at the castle grounds outside the great hall. Nothing more complicated than that.

It was easier to deal with the reality of being in the Horde without any memories of her closest friends attached to any part of the Fright Zone. But for six months they must have walked the halls of Bright Moon reminded that at every nook and cranny, Adora wouldn't be there. And before them, Catra must have felt that loss too, in the walls where they used to run and all the secret places they knew to hide.

_When are you ever there for your friends?_

It seemed as though the times she'd done things right were a short list against the things she'd done wrong. Every choice she'd made was impossible; she left the Horde to do the right thing; she acted the perfect prisoner to do the right thing; she fought in a war to do the right thing. And on the flipside, she lost her best friend, had to abandon her new friends, and killed people, wrong or right, to keep going. Every drop of sweetness in her life had been met with a downpour of bitterness. And in that haze, Adora knew she was blind, one way or another, to the other ways she'd hurt her friends. In the name of... what? For the honor of... who?

She took another swing at the cup she was still holding onto. If she did not hold onto something -- the cup, or the belief that after Skeletor there would be no more -- then she would be adrift and lost and no good to anyone. So she held onto what she could hold onto.

There was a crunch of grass in front of her. For a split second, she thought of Glimmer, but the footsteps were too deliberate for that to be true. She knew, without looking up, who it was in front of her.

"I go and beat a bunch of Bright Mooners and you're not even around to challenge."

Adora was tired of dealing with the maze of right or wrong answers. Earnest or clever, smart or stupid, nothing she said could appease Catra or satisfy the Queen she'd pledged to. She said nothing.

"You drunk?"

"No." That question, Adora could answer.

As though she hadn't heard, Catra continued. "They've turned you into a souse, huh."

Adora hated the way Catra was baiting her, waiting for her hackles to rise.

_I saved your life the other day!_

_And she saved yours that night too._

"What is it to you, anyway?"

She waited for Catra to gloat. That she was supposed to be the strait-laced one, or something, or that Catra had beaten her in some mental game she had no idea they were competing on.

To begin with, why was Catra behaving like they'd regressed back to their early rivalry? It was completely unlike two days before, when they'd almost gotten along, even if the whole time that peace was built on stilted conversations and stretches of awkward quiet. And she was nothing like the collected Commander Adora had seen of her since after the war.

"I dunno," Catra said, in that irritating tone, "ain't very She-Ra of you."

"The last She-Ra died and failed to protect Etheria," Adora snapped, "Pretty sure I'm  _very_  She-Ra, thank you."

"Giving up so soon? Who's gonna be the knight in shining armor now?"

"You can have that title if you want it so much," Adora said. "You're the one going around making everything, I don't know, some kind of dick sizing competition. Is this really who you are now?"

"Dick sizing competition? Everything was a dick sizing competition to you, when you were winning."

"That was Shadow Weaver."

"But you went along with it."

Adora took a deep breath and bit back her first impulse to make excuses. She sat up straight and looked Catra in the eye. "I did. But I stopped. And I'm sorry, I am. But she's gone and I'm doing my best to make amends, dammit. Why the hell are you raising her from the dead? I mean, I thought you killed her."

"I did," Catra said, seething.

_How?_  Adora ached to ask. But Catra kept on going. "'Raising her from the dead', huh. It's so easy for you to forget about everything that happened in the Horde."

"I've been wanting to ask you how she died ever since I agreed to be a ward!"

"Well, you're no longer a ward of the Horde, and it's no longer any of your business."

As a last ditch attempt to get the answer out of Catra, Adora told her Scorpia's version.

"Scorpia told me that the power was out the whole day because of your battle with Shadow Weaver, that no one could even enter the room because it was on lockdown while the power was out. And that when they opened the door, you were... sitting up against the wall. And not too far away, next to the Black Garnet, was a charred body. And that everyone knew it was her because of the mask, because of the hair."

"Y'see, you know the story already. There's nothing to talk about."

Perhaps it was a victory that Catra turned tail and left, but Adora only felt spent.

She had spent the entire time at Bright Moon on her best, most repentant behavior. If there was something she lacked, a blind spot, she'd tried to account for it. She would never know unless she asked, and she could never ask if Catra was always too busy keeping score over things large and small, remembered and forgotten.

And also -- there was her best behavior on behalf of both the Horde and Bright Moon. The response was all punishment. There was the lack of trust, subtle but present, of the Queen. There was Catra's constant -- Adora could find no other word but bullying. It was ridiculous to expect that Adora could read and deciper the reason behind every swing of her mood or her tail.

_Is it really a mood swing if she was nice to you for one single day out of six months?_

She raised the cup to her lips. Then to make sure, she shook the cup. Nope, it was empty.

Drinking was one thing, being hungover before a life-or-death mission was another. She was sure everyone would notice that she'd snuck off to leave, but couldn't be bothered to care. She stretched out her legs then stood to walk back to her room and make an early exit.

Once she flopped into bed, she remembered Scorpia's last words from the time she'd given into her curiosity and asked for Scorpia's version of Catra's battle with Shadow Weaver.

Scorpia had said, "She must have been in the dark the whole day."

//

//

//

A/N: It's always fun to balance the early Catra-heavy chapters with sad, lost Adora chapters. Is it fair to ask 'what did I do' in a relationship, or should people exercise more self-awareness? And yet Adora knows how comforting it is to have someone who just gets it without having to say anything.

I am so tired I am flopping off to bed. Thanks for reading y'all have a good incoming weekday. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Catra is forced to live through every cliched plan to save some princesses.

//

Smile like you mean it

//

 

(Over a year ago)

 

_Catra glanced sideways at the siege cannon, currently mounted on a turret. The turret, as part of a modular series, could be attached to a tank, or to the top of any vehicle that could hold its bulk. The new siege cannon  was about as long as a standard tank’s cannon, slightly fatter, with wires attached to it and a grey control panel._

_Catra ran her index finger’s claw lightly over the inside of her thumb. The display was everything wrong about having a scientist make weapons._

_"Entrapta gave us a demonstration for a new cannon design the other day," Hordak said. His voice reverberated in the sparse warehouse they used for testing Entrapta’s new ideas. "I was told you were taught how to use it."_

_"Yes, my lord. But the siege cannon, it seems... finicky," Catra said. She had never said this in front of Entrapta, even as Entrapta had briefed her on how to navigate the control panel. (Only Entrapta would design a weapon too complicated for actual use.) Sure, a cannon that could penetrate BOTH magic and physical shields was good, but --_

_"How so?"_

_"I mean, it's great that we have a cannon with two payloads in one missile, but there's so much to calibrate. It's like... a grenade launcher inside a grenade launcher." (A very Entrapta type of innovation.) "When we're fighting on the battlefield, we don't have time to go "oh, I set the first payload to detonate in five seconds, and we need the second payload to detonate in ten..." Catra paused, letting her words sink. "I just want two soldiers with bazookas, on my command, one with that forcefield-penetrating payload and another waiting for my go signal to blow up the castle wall whose shields we'd just wrecked."_

_"My understanding is that the first payload is made of First Ones magic itself. It takes time to spread this... virus that will eat the magic field. The calibration is to make sure that the second payload won't bounce off magic that hasn't dissolved fully, but deliver the killing blow at the instant the force fields break."_

_If there was one major difference between him and Shadow Weaver, it was that Lord Hordak thought his plans through along with her._

_"Lord Hordak, we're not blind. A spotter can check and clear a second shot. The timing might not be 'instant' but we're sending out younger and younger soldiers out there, the design on this thing isn't... practical. Nobody has time to read a display when there are people shooting at them and bombs going off and magic all over the place."_

_"Firstly -- only you will be using this cannon, and you're a crack shot. Secondly, as we know from experience, a follow-up is a luxury, considering that they'll have your position after your first fire. The Cannon's innovation is that it only takes one round." Lord Hordak countered._

_He had a point there._

_"Either way," he continued, "we've already had a field demonstration of the bomb's ability to tear through magic-reinforced castle walls. That's not what this particular test is about."_

_Catra heard the scrape of a leg iron against the floor before she saw the prisoner dragged in. A rhythm settled into place -- the guards’s footsteps followed by the_ clink-clink-clink _of chains and the dull rasping of an iron ball. There was no way for this prisoner to stand: both his feet were cuffed together, along with the weight trailing behind him. On his knees, the man was muzzled and his hands cuffed behind him as well. He was then left kneeling about fifty meters away from her and Hordak and his guardsmen. Muzzled and restrained as he was, the man kept his spine straight. He was outfitted with black armor that glinted -- Catra realized his armor was one of the best prototypes Entrapta had made, based on First Ones’s code._

_Catra could feel everyone’s gaze settle on her as the guards took their position._

_"We get one shot with this Cannon," she said. "Kind of a waste on a person, and they won’t just be fifty meters away from us." She turned to Hordak. Siege weaponry wasn't meant to be accurate, just devastating, and considering the cost of a single shot of this damn thing -- it seemed wasteful._

Plus, whoever's on cleaning duty after the cannon fires will be stuck there for hours, _she thought._

_"Not a waste," Hordak said._

_Catra realized, at a longer look of the man's armor, who it was Hordak was thinking of. Hordak could see it in her expression too, and his grin spread as he saw understanding dawn on her face. "You have your chance to even the odds with your old rival. A permanent win, I believe."_

_Catra smiled, feeling the gaze of every damn guard in the room._

_He thought he was doing her a favor. That he was a benevolent lord, giving her the highest honor. That he'd just secured her loyalty for life. All her concerns about timing and shots didn't matter when her target was made of magic and muscle. The magic would fizzle out at the same time the payload would blow up._ Set the value to zero for the effect to be instant _, she could hear Entrapta say._

_Catra kept her grin, showing a little teeth even. She could feel the approval in the air, not just from him, but from every Horde soldier in the room. Some of them were jealous, but most of them, she knew, accepted that the kill was hers._

_"Thank you Lord Hordak," she said._

_Then she turned to the village guardsman._

Better get a scope on this thing, _she thought._

//

//

//

The first plan Bright Moon brought up was a diversion, which was so typically stupid of them Catra had to bite her cheek. The next stupid thing they suggested was to steal uniforms from dead or knocked out guards. Catra, as lead, worked around their input.

There were several ways into Mystacor: the fun way, where travellers dropped in from a high enough cliff, as though jumping from the clouds, a favorite of civilians seeking thrills; the supply routes, in which wagons of food and trade goods passed through floating platforms that appeared only on Mystacor's schedule; and occasionally, mages would fly in. All the entrances and drop points were provided for in the crystal that Catra and Adora retrieved from the dead man at the last leg of their trip to Bright Moon. At the center was the castle compound, though as Mystacor considered itself civilized, they preferred that the castle be called the Mystacor Temple ( _Nobody cares,_ Catra thought.) At the very center of the fortifications were the grand hall, as any castle would have, and further inside, through a spacious courtyard, were the Lunar Lenses. 

"Skeletor probably got his hands on this crystal and split his troops up. Imagine a bunch of motorcycles dropping in from the cliffs, under cloud cover. Pretty terrifying, especially at night with the fog. No need for tanks, it's all lightning warfare. Then he probably rolled out some all-terrain carriers, ramming their way through the gates -- does Mystacor even have gates?" Catra asked, mid-sentence, scanning the map in front of them. "Yeah, so those gates are probably made of old steel track by now," she said. "Hordak's hunkering down."

"And this is important how?"

"It explains, to me at least, how they do their raiding or patrols. That's our way in." Catra tapped the supply route gate farthest away from Mystacor's center, as Skeletor's guards would be too distantly spaced to guard it well or care. The supply routes were currently used as roads for patrol units to go out and in of Mystacor, raiding, looting, and securing territory. That was their way in, Catra decided.

They would ambush a patrol unit. Kill everyone. Return driving the unit’s carrier. "We can do the uniform switching thing then," she said, cheering up the Bright Moon guy that suggested it. "Usually outside patrols know each other. We could get found, I don't want us assuming the Horde are all stupid and not going to notice that Steve the guy who was driving is now calling himself "Matt" and sounds like he doesn't know what he's doing, so we need to work with or around those details. Then once we’re let into the outpost gate, we’ll kill everyone in the guard tower floor by floor, before anyone has time to alert the rest of the city. We’ll secure the guard post and for sure by now they’ll have our tech up and running to monitor their territory. We’ll hack into whatever tech Skeletor has set up using Entrapta's program.”

"You're assuming an awful lot," Netossa pointed out at this point.

"Our enemy was part of the Horde," Catra replied. "They did the same thing for twenty years, they're not about to change now. Old dogs, new tricks, et cetera, et cetera. Also, you have us. We're quiet and we know our way around their tech. That's why I said we'll be killing people floor by floor or room by room. So there’s no system-wide alert."

In addition to the mission team, Horde soldiers would make their way to their side of Mystacor, ready for retrieval or backup, just as Bright Moon forces also rallied with as little publicity or noise as possible to move to the side of Mystacor facing Bright Moon.

Their biggest advantage was the open line between the Black Garnet (Scorpia) and Bright Moon (Netossa), short of Skeletor frazzling their frequencies.

Of that possibility, Entrapta said, "He could. He has exploding bird messengers now."

As with all things Entrapta, Catra had no idea if she'd learned sarcasm and was using it on her, or was simply stating a fact.

"So we make provisions for that, no big deal. We'll figure out where the princesses from whatever intel we can get. It's pretty likely they're in two separate places."

"So we'll split up," Netossa said. It was the third cliched plan they'd offered. Catra grit her teeth, but was forced to concede; it was the faster way. "We have no choice."

"A mix then, Bright Moon and Horde?"

"No, we've never worked together. Bright Moon can go after Princess Glimmer once we've figured out where she is, the Horde will take care of finding Princess Frosta."

After a brief pause, someone from Bright Moon cleared their throat. “Are we just supposed to kill every guard that sees us?”

“Yes”, Catra drawled with a matching eyeroll. Seeing as the man took her seriously, she replied, "If you're far away from them and they don't come up to you to ask if you have any beer on you, there's obviously no need to. Also, wearing a helmet is suspicious if you go indoors. Just... be cool. Don't curl up and walk like you're hiding something. Walk like you're going to the mess hall and dying of hunger or you're on a patrol or on your way to your shift. And go in groups."

The man mulled over those words. "Be cool," he repeated to himself. The Bright Mooners looked to each other, silently figuring out who'd be in which group.

"Adora," Catra said, curtly. "You were in the Horde. You know how to behave. They'll follow your cue. A helmet outside of an active shift is just weird."

"Yeah, except if I take out my helmet --" Adora started to say.

"Yeah, not to mention the sword on your back," Catra said. "Or belt, whatever. We have no choice but to keep the sword disguised and your face hidden. On the plus side, there's always that weirdo in a squad who's all like 'regulation states helmets are always on' or whatever. Or you could just stay outside and have a reason to keep the helmet on, like it keeps your head from the cold or whatever."

"What if they need me inside?"

"You can talk to them through these," Catra said, removing a small device from her ear. "We'll all have one, they're basically tiny phones. You guys have that, right? Phones? Little bits of magic that non-princesses can use?"

Netossa rolled her eyes in response. "We've dealt with some of your... tech."

“They are technically called EarPods,” Entrapta said. “We need to be accurate because there are several models.”

“I thought you called them AirBuds?”

“That was the noise-cancelling version. They’re not so useful in a mission. Great for relaxing, though.”

“Yeah,” Catra said, remembering all the times they were in the training hall watching soldiers in perfect coordination fail to hear bots rolling up on them. All she heard all afternoon were versions of, “Oh no, they can’t hear you!”

“Anyway,” Catra said. “We’re outfitting everyone in one of these, then keeping a line with some selected officers on both sides of Mystacor. Next on the agenda, we’ve got to think of extraction. They will probably be too weak to carry themselves.”

“They’re young and tiny, we could strap ‘em on our backs.”

Catra thought about it. They were planning to go in, slit the throats of anyone who suspected them of being Alliance members, extract two hostages, then come back the way they came. Inside patrols always came in twos at the least and their routes would intersect with others regularly just to make sure everyone was accounted for. Getting in was a possibility, but staying in and extracting not one but two Princesses… 

“If we can find less suspicious prop, that would be better. ‘Cuz we have to take them out the same way we came in.”

_Less suspicious prop_ sounded inadequate, but Catra also knew that the Horde carried lots of machinery and that something could be worked out. “If something does go wrong, just take the hostages and make a run for it. We’ll assign mules -- they’ll carry the Princesses if they have to.”

Adora looked at her then. They hadn’t done much looking at each other since their last conversation. 

“You wanna carry Sparkles, if it comes to that?”

Adora nodded.

“Fine.”

After sizing up her men to decide on who’d carry Princess Frosta, the meeting room fell silent.

“There’s one last thing about Mystacor,” Netossa said. Catra’s ears perked up. “It’s a magical city, built on an ancient First Ones fort. Some defense systems probably remain.”

“Bleh,” Catra said. “If they had actual First Ones defenses, why did they fall so fast?”

Netossa tilted her head slightly. “They’re mages there, not mage-knights, or magical soldiers. I’m saying, Adora’s sword may have some use for you.”

“Maybe,” Catra allowed. “But that’s something I know almost nothing about.”

_First Ones tech usually means head-fucking, and I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much._

From the Bright Moon side, a man asked, “Is -- is that it?”

Catra thought for a moment. They’d gone over the mission objective (to save two princesses and leave the remaining prisoners -- Catra drilled that last part into them, that this wasn’t the time for that); that Adora was not to turn into She-Ra unless the mission had gone to shit; that Catra would make the call when to abandon the mission in the event of anything going wrong; and that the priority was to get people out _alive_ regardless of mission status.

“Try not to die,” she said to the man wryly. 

//

the exit door leads in

//

Catra’s plan went without a hitch. They found the princesses, each kept in a tower used as a granary store. Having no real enemy to fortify against, several buildings inside Mystacor’s fortifications had been converted into warehouses, libraries, meeting halls. Given the high ceilings, large windows, and density of Horde soldiers at the front of each Princess Tower, both teams made the decision to find and scale buildings, stay high and climb the tower from a few stories above the ground, bypassing the guards below. The lack of moonlight worked to their advantage -- Skeletor’s soldiers had only street lights for visibility.

Mystacor’s buildings were less dense than the Horde’s, where nearly every Horde kid had learned to climb and swing from every loose pipe and panel. Mystacor’s wide open spaces meant it was easy to spot anyone on the ground, but the trees and vegetation also offered plenty of cover above. From a courtyard, Catra’s teams surveyed their area, taking down any eyes likely to spot them. So far, no alarms had been sounded, though walking through Mystacor had been a bit of a challenge, guessing when her team should split up into smaller groups and when to meet. Several times they’d walked past a guard, the lateness of their shift protecting them from too much scrutiny. On the Bright Moon side, everything was going smoothly as well, with Adora identifying potential hazards and giving precise orders when to strike and where to leave the bodies. In her head, Catra sped up the timer ticking away the minutes they had till they were caught.

Eventually her team converged at the back of a smithy right next to the granary/tower where Princess Frosta was held.

They began to climb. Both teams kept each other in the loop: _enemy down, guards on the roof, -- roof clear -- we’re scaling the tower --_ whump -- _we’ve found our mark._

“Glimmer’s unconscious,” Catra heard Adora report, ignoring her. “Weak pulse,” and here Catra could hear some wobbling in Adora’s voice, “but she’s okay.” The line was open for a moment, then the static cut off abruptly as Adora muted her line. _She’s keeping it to herself,_ Catra thought. And, in a detached way, she thought, _that’s the professional thing to do._

Catra sat on the smithy roof, letting her own team take care of extracting Princess Frosta. Instead of joining them, she held her position and focused on updates from both teams, her hands loosely holding onto a rifle with a silencer, her eyes, with their limited range of vision thanks to the helmet) watching as the last Horde soldier made his way into the tower window. Almost immediately she heard her team as well: _Dismantling magic field -- Old Soul is unconscious, but alive._

“Okay, let’s get Old Soul and Sparkles out,” Catra muttered. A breeze blew by, the wind whistling in the dark. She watched a bush some distance below her sway in the wind, wondering if anyone could see a fresh corpse through the stems. When no roving patrol passed by, she breathed a sigh of relief.

Princess Frosta, despite her teenage years, was still as tiny as a child, and easy to carry.

“Wow, are we really just carrying her like that?” Catra muttered, when the rest of her team scaled down the tower with a princess wrapped in a half-open body bag, strapped to the beefiest boy on their team. “Yeah, I guess that works,” Catra muttered. “We’ve got Old Soul,” Catra muttered. “We’re headed back to Point A.”

//

//

//

Catra heard nothing unusual on the radio all the way back, which should have been the first sign of trouble.

“Ma’am,” one of the Bright Moon soldiers ran up to her, the last among them.

“Where’s Adora?”

“She was behind us, telling us to go ahead.”

Adora, like Catra, had been rear guard for the whole mission except to carry that Princess of hers.

“I thought she was carrying Sparkles?”

“Uh,” the man suddenly faltered. “Yes, but halfway through she passed the Princess to one of us, so we could move faster. Like a relay.”

Catra seethed. She pressed a button on her wrist watch, opening the shared comm line.

“Adora, where are you?”

After a brief crackle of static, Adora’s line opened.

“I’m outside Mystacor’s Grand Hall,” Adora said. “I’m going in, so you better pack up and leave now before the alarm goes nuts… it’ll take a while before Skeletor’s troops start hunting the extraction team down.” A pause, then: “Good bye, Catra.”

The line went dead. Catra’s head whipped back to the rest of the team, who were all frozen, looking to her for orders. For a moment, the world had gone quiet. “Get going!” she snapped. “Take two APCs and drive like hell till the safe zone. _Move_!”

The Bright Moon contingent were furiously tapping on their watches. “Colonel Netossa, requesting orders, please!”

“Are the princesses secured?”

“Yes, but --” 

“Follow the mission, get out of there!”

Alarms went off inside the outpost and in the distance. More lights lit up the sky as well. Catra pushed in one of the soldiers into the carrier. “Commander,” one of the Horde soldiers stammered.

“I’ll follow,” Catra said, turning around and running back into Mystacor. “Scorpia,” she said, into the line, “Navigate everyone to the Bright Moon safe zone in one piece. Under no circumstances are you to spend any resources extracting me. The Horde is yours.”

Catra ran back into Mystacor. Earlier, the sound of her boots thudding against the pavement was too loud for her liking. Now, she could barely hear anything what with the din in her head and her immediate surroundings. “We are _not_ leaving Catra!” she heard Entrapta shriek into her ear, as Scorpia tried to calm her down. Irritated, Catra she took a left into a dark corner between two buildings, took out her helmet, pulled out the buds and stepped on them. Once she was sure they were destroyed beyond all repair, she put the helmet on again.

As though she’d been jolted with electricity, Catra remembered Adora’s words: 

_"The last She-Ra died and failed to protect Etheria. Pretty sure I'm_ very _She-Ra, thank you."_

To shake the pain off her chest, Catra snarled, _You_ have _to play the martyr, don’t you?_

It didn’t stop her heart from beating in her ears, madly, each throb a reminder that _you did this_ \-- the voice in her head sounding more and more like Shadow Weaver.

//

breaking and entering

//

By the time Catra had made it to Mystacor’s Temple, soldiers were being sorted into parties -- some assigned to secure the perimeter, others assigned to hunt down other Princess Alliance agents, and still others assigned to a giant battering ram trying to break a shimmering blue dome that covered the castle gate. The portcullis and gatehouse windows were all covered in a blue sheen of energy as well; the entire castle was on a magical lockdown. Others were scaling the castle wall, only to find the same blue field covering every opening -- window or door -- into the castle.

In the distance, a man with a grappling hook tried to wreck the field by throwing the hook into it; instead the hook was repelled with so much force it took the man flying with it, falling down screaming from the castle’s top higher turrets. The rest of the soldiers who’d scaled the wall watched and looked at each other.

_Yeah, they’re all going to nope the fuck out of that,_ Catra thought. She weaved around different divisions, all busy setting up cannons, trying to find a way inside to reinforce Skeletor’s guard inside.

_Skeletor has at least three hundred of his men inside that castle._

The thought jacked up her heart yet again, but she stilled her impulse to run and scale the wall with her claws. Instead she walked swiftly through the mass of soldiers, looking for less busy sections of the wall. Picking up a grappling hook, she scaled the wall along with some others as though she’d been assigned to do it. Once at the top, she waited for the other soldiers to come in. Because everyone went up at a different pace, she was able to help them up, then muffle their mouths and stab their necks. Then she turned around to the entryway leading into the castle, glowing blue and thrumming.

_No point trying to open it by force,_ she thought, relaxing instead and passing a hand through. For a second, a searing heat tore through her mind, but then it passed -- as did her hand. The rest of her came through easily, and once she was through, she ran down the stairs into the castle’s vestibule.

 

-End of chapter-

Thanks for reading. Next chapter is likely to be up before the end of August (crosses fingers).


	8. Chapter 8

TW: Violence.

//

//

//

SHUDDER

 

Catra flattened herself against the wall just before the final bend down the stairs, unnerved by the silence that had only grown as she bounded down the stairs.

She stuck her neck out, just a bit. From her view, framed by the walls, there were only bodies on the floor and smashed tiles. She took a muted step down the stairs, then another, the view of the castle interior growing until she’d made it all the way through, completing the picture bit by bit.

Six months had done nothing to blunt Adora’s skill to wreak havoc. Bled-out bodies lay everywhere, and jagged, unnatural patterns of earth erupted on the walls and floor. She-ra’s magic, no doubt. Here and there were bodies whose ribs were caved in, care of a boulder to the chest. These soldiers, Skeletor’s own guard, had died by the sword, by blunt force, and sometimes -- Catra could smell explosives in the air -- probably their own equipment used against them. 

Every other step Catra took was over a dead body as she approached the grand hall, locked again with that blue haze. She hoped her luck hadn’t run out, and pushed her hand in. Once again, the blue force field let her through. This time, however, a voice in her head clearly spoke: _Save the She-Ra._  

Angry with the intrusion, Catra retorted with her own thoughts: _I’m here for Adora._

Still the blue haze accepted her, and once both hands were through, she pushed the doors open.

//

//

//

The fighting in the grand hall was at the dais, where She-Ra was fending off a mutant as big as her. From the distance and the darkness -- many of the torches lining the hall had fallen and the smell of smoke and burning armor and plastic was thick in the air -- Catra could see a single fin at the back of the man’s head.

_Leech!_

Leech was not alone. A few dining tables away, six guards were trying to get a clear shot of her. As Catra made her way through the hall, crouching and hiding behind tables that weren’t upturned or wrecked, she could hear an erratic pattern of laserfire trying and so far failing to miss their target _._ Nor was Leech moving to give his riflemen enough space to target She-Ra and not his own bulk. She moved in closer, picking up a still-warm rifle and a taser, which she buckled to her belt. She wanted to be close enough to run to Adora once she picked off the guards, but a comfortable enough distance to shoot every rifleman in one quick arc.

Crouching on a table, Catra waited for a moment before standing up and ambushing the guards from behind, finger squeezing the trigger and releasing each blast, careful not to let any stray rounds hit the dais, where she could hit Adora by accident. The guards were too slow. She’d downed three of them before they counter-fired. Catra ducked, a lucky blast grazing her hair just slightly, quickly tucking her rifle’s butt stock under her arm, allowing her to hold the rifle with only her right hand. With her left, she charged up the taser, just in time as the guards had caught up to her. She backed away as they flung the table she’d used as a cover towards her. Catra stumbled as she backed into a bench, falling onto a table, as a guard came at her with a taser. It was too late to dodge; she instead dropped the taser and flung her rifle up and fired straight at the man’s head, the taser from his hand falling to the bench just next to her knees. He keeled over; behind him, a still another had a rifle trained at her. Catra crouched a little and ran leftward, trying to put some distance between her and the last two guards; she hissed as a second shot grazed at her shoulder. She ducked again behind a table and used her ears to find her enemies, picking a closer one off and then crouching again. The last target ducked for cover as well, but Catra didn’t have time for that. She stood up, both hands on her rifle, trusting her ears would give away her enemy’s position. She shot him just as he squeezed his last shot at her -- a wasted shot from a wasted soldier.

At the dais, Adora reeled from a blow to the cheek, falling to the floor. With a target in the clear, Catra took aim and shot as she walked to the dais, but Leech dodged and turned.

A lone shot glanced off his armor. Catra tossed the spent rifle and picked up a second gun as Leech unslung his crossbow. Behind him, Adora was struggling to get up. Catra saw the feint for what it was and shot wildly at his bulk, forcing him to move back and focus on Catra. One of his bolts sank partway into her arm, but she shrugged it off.

“Your target’s here, dipshit,” she said as they fell into a pattern of ducking and exchanging shots. Adora had crawled off the dais, leaning onto one of the tables. Catra crouched her way through to Adora, assessing the damage on She-Ra’s body for a split second before keeping up the fire, which maintained their distance. There was no way she could physically overpower Leech, and he was professional enough not to be goaded by her.

“So I was thinking, a taser at full charge might knock him out,” Catra muttered as the shots dwindled and both sides took a breather. She kept an ear out for Leech’s crossbow, knowing he had a quiver of those electrified bolts. Leech, like Octavia, had thicker skin and heavier armor than most, given that they had the strength to _carry_ the armor they alone could wear. Catra had gone the opposite route, with less armor but the speed and maneuverability to be as difficult a target as possible.

“Might take more than one,” She-Ra said, wincing as she touched her own cheek. A bruise was blooming across the side of her face. She took a look at the bolt and looked up to Catra, asking for permission and pulling out the metal when Catra nodded. It was a shallow puncture, and would heal. 

“What happened to your healing power?” Catra asked.

“It’s faster with the sword.”

“Where _is_ your sword?”

“Somewhere in the hall,” Adora admitted. 

Catra breathed in, a sharp breath that reminded her of all the dead strewn in the room.

“Okay. We can’t beat him from a distance. We have to close it somehow. I’m assuming Skeletor is in the next room?”

“He ran to the Lunar Lenses,” Adora said, a grimace on her face every time she spoke. “He’s trying to overrule my control over the defenses here.”

“So Leech is trying to make as much time as possible for Skeletor. He’s going to draw this fight out.”

“We’ll have to bring the fight to him then,” Adora said. “I’ll go.”

As much as Catra wanted to argue with Adora’s purpling face, she knew it was the fastest option. She-Ra was still much bigger than her, and if _Catra_ had been on the receiving end of Leech’s blow, it would have been a KO.

“Right,” Catra said. She looked around the floor. Two tables away, an outstretched hand still held onto a taser. She nudged Adora and pointed. Adora nodded.

Adora crawled towards the taser while Catra kept her position, rifle ready. She heard the draw of a bow and got up just enough to lay her rifle on the table and shoot, keeping the pressure up to distract him. To her left, Adora had picked up the taser and made a leap over the dais, flinging the electrified baton straight at Leech’s face. The taser connected with a wild sizzle as Leech roared in pain and fell to his knees. He kicked the baton away wildly and tried to stand as Adora smashed into his skull into the floor with a wound up left jab. She picked up the taser and let it rip into Leech.

“Okay,” Catra said, running up to her and pushing her away from what remained of Leech. She could smell the mutant’s skin sizzling off and the heat emanating from his corpse.  “Okay, that’s enough, dammit. Where’s your sword?!”

They found the sword kicked underneath a table. Adora’s face slowly turned from purple back to its ruddy color.

“What about you?”

“I’m fine,” Catra said, ignoring the sting in her arm. “Let’s get this over with.”

//

//

//

All Catra heard, once she opened the doors to the Lunar Lenses, was a long, ringing boom. Blinded for a moment, she felt herself fall to the floor and struggled to get up, only to feel a sharp lancing pain to her torso. The smell of her blood was so sharp she could imagine the tangy taste of it.

“Catra!”

Slowly, she came to. Adora was kneeling next to her, Adora’s right arm around her while her left held onto… a shield. It had transformed, but not fast enough to block Skeletor’s blast. 

Looking up, she saw Skeletor through Adora’s forcefield, a blue film protecting them. Skeletor was holding up a staff.

That was new.

Catra should have known that Skeletor would have shot at anyone, friend or foe, at the entrance. Or perhaps he’d known that Leech couldn’t beat She-Ra.

“Not a bad upgrade, don’t you think?” It sounded as though he were under water, or perhaps Catra’s ears were still reeling from the sound of the explosion. Skeletor brandished his staff. It glowed for a moment then spewed out a shower of magic blasts. Adora’s shield held, but wavered. The debris settled quickly now that most of the surrounding columns were wrecked, putting them in a stalemate that was sure to break at any moment. 

“Do you think he’s drawing power from the Lenses?”

“You shouldn’t talk.”

Catra shook her head. All it did was make her more dizzy. “Drop the shield, you won’t win a fight with defense. I can still move.”

Adora looked down at her torso, then up at her, stricken. Catra knew better than to look down then; tried not to think about the wetness she could feel seeping into her clothes. 

A second rain of blasts erupted out of Skeletor’s new toy. Adora raised her shield to meet the onslaught. Just as she thought the shield would shatter at the strength of the impact, the hail stopped and Catra wiggled free of Adora’s hold. She still had her rifle. Sitting up, she fired through the haze and smoke. Her shot fizzled into nothing as Skeletor countered with a forcefield drawn by the wave of a hand. With another wave, the smoke dissipated against a gust of wind called by his hand. Adora took the opening and fired a blast of her own as she ran towards him with an overhead swing. Catra heard a distant twang of metal on metal as Skeletor parried. She finally looked down to where her torso was turning red and thought, _like hell I’m going to let a lucky shot bleed me out._

She fished around her belt for a bit of salve and a patch, slapping them. At least the pain kept her from blacking out entirely. In the distance, Adora, on the left, rained blow after blow on Skeletor, who parried every swing. Catra struggled to see clear enough for a shot.

Holy shit, she was out of breath. Then Skeletor held a palm outstretched. At such a close range, Adora’s shield took most of it, until she redirected the blast by throwing out her arm.

That left her wide open for Skeletor’s staff, which jabbed at her with a white bolt of lightning straight to the chest, smoke rising from the intensity of it. The force of magic tossed Adora a few meters away.

_Holy shit, how is he doing magic with both hands…?_

_Focus on Skeletor!_ With a clear target, Catra fired all the rounds she had left. _Bkam! Bkam!_ Several of them landed on Skeletor, who took the blows as though they were nothing more than punches.

Catra grit her teeth as he turned to her, knowing that she couldn’t run. He held up a hand and it glowed white.

Catra couldn’t look away.

A blast from Adora’s sword hit with enough intensity to swing Skeletor’s hand, and the pulsing beam of magic blasted a column instead. Wildly now, Skeletor lunged to She-Ra, swinging his own staff with a single right hand as he tried to shake the pain away from the other.

Catra winced as she tried to stand. A glance to her right side told her the blood flowed a little less now. She fumbled around her pockets, picking up a spare cartridge and fumbling to reload. Her hands were less steady, but managed to slide the cartridge in. She took cover at the closest column and cursed when she started seeing double. 

“Adora, out of the way!”

Adora backed off and Skeletor’s staff clove the air; Catra squeezed the trigger and let loose a barrage of blasts, feeling hope well up when they hit Skeletor square on the head. 

Skeletor dropped the staff and fell to his knees. Adora advanced, only to jump away again when the ground around her burst into a line of spikes. Jumping out of the way, she was repelled far enough for Skeletor to recover. This time he aimed a second blast at Catra with his right hand and what little remained of the column exploded into rocks spraying out everywhere.

Catra started to run, but it was more of a scramble as Skeletor approached. She knew he was herding her into a tighter spot with his blasts, but couldn’t move fast enough to evade. She could feel the blood trickling down her leg.

_Motherfucker-!_

Adora barreled into Skeletor with her shield, ending in a wrestle for Skeletor’s staff. Catra’s arms and legs collapsed from exertion. She saw Adora shift the shield back into a sword at the same time Skeletor grasped for his staff, and the two weapons collided in a blast of white.

 

//

//

//

  


I stuck to the original 80s design for Leech, except for those weird suction caps at his extremities.

I also stuck to Skeletor’s semi-magical abilities, care of this wonderful gem: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyhLabKXctM ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyhLabKXctM)   
  
One of the things I *really* wanted to do for this chapter was have Catra rip apart the necks, as it is the most efficient use of her claws. Unfortunately I see [ THESE ](https://imgur.com/a/YWmbPCA)screenshots of the horde soldiers and they have neck protection… but no groin guard? But it’s not fun to target balls for claw attacks… so we’re stuck with some good old tasers, laser rifles, and swords.


	9. Chapter 9

Season 3 is out and I can’t even watch Season 2 because of this fic!! 3-4 or so more chapters left. I’m pretty sure my Entrapta here is OC with the new season, but welp. The canon divergence marches on.

//

blare of the trumpet

//

By the time Bow arrived at Mystacor, the dawn had broken and the battle had been won. Scorpia’s gamble to bolster theirs and Bright Moon’s numbers by freeing all the mages in Mystacor had paid off, once they had figured out where the mages were being kept and how to recharge their magic. Bright Moon squads were arriving from nearby villages; the Horde was too far away to send help in a timely manner, but did so anyway through their airships.

_“We’re sending all of them,” Entrapta said, bluntly._

_Lonnie made the mistake of playing the devil’s advocate: “What about protecting the Horde in the event of… other enemy attacks?”_

_“That’s a hypothetical situation!” Entrapta exploded. “This is not!”_

_“Entrapta, we’ll send what troops we can send on aircraft. But we’re not moving out the entire Horde, it would take too long. The battle must be won with what we can send in time. Not even Bright Moon could move their host through the Whispering Woods quick enough to see the end of this battle.”_

_“I should go,” Bow piped up._

_“Don’t think you can go without me, either,” Swift Wind said, despite the exhaustion of carrying Bow from Mystacor, only to go back._

And yet, by the time he’d arrived, whatever gamble Adora had taken -- that Catra took along with her, according to reports -- had paid off. Most of Mystacor’s castle and the area surrounding the Lunar Lenses had exploded in some massive three-way battle, taking out ex-Horde machinery and manpower. While that had been going on, Bright Moon/Horde soldiers had snuck back in to set the mages free. Weaponizing the civilians, Entrapta had called it. Nobody disagreed with the plan; the political implications of involving civilians were things they could worry about later.

That there was a _later_ , to begin with, would probably silence any complaints about the Horde's way of solving problems.

Spotting a patch free from debris, close to the center of Mystacor, Bow said, "Let's land."

//

//

_Weeks later:_

//

“‘Dora’s awake,” Scorpia said, after knocking and entering in the middle of the afternoon.

Entrapta nodded. Without looking, she could see Scorpia -- dark circles under eyes, her pale hair matted and in sticking up in odd angles, her face nearly as white as her hair where the shadows and the lack of sleep hadn’t drawn dark angles.

“Catra might follow,” Scorpia said.

Entrapta nodded, still not tearing her eyes away from the steady stream of data coursing through a screen large enough to fill the wall.

Sounds from the outside came in now that Scorpia had opened the door. She could hear Princess Glimmer and Bow, could picture them eagerly crowding Adora’s bed, holding her hand, trying to find the balance between joy and the somber restraint needed to keep Adora calm and healing.

“Do you want to talk to her?”

“She’s too injured to stay conscious for long,” Entrapta said. “I don’t want to tax her.”

“I don’t know what to say to her, either.”

That was a surprise. Usually Scorpia knew how to talk to Adora.

Entrapta, not so much. “I only know I’m glad they’re both alive.”

_Yes, but only one of them is conscious,_ Entrapta thought.

“Can I join you?”

“There’s nothing going on, just reports and notifications,” Entrapta admitted. But she was glad when Scorpia came in and closed the door. It was, once again, just the mechanical hum of the air conditioning in her lab. The trying-not-to-be-loud-and-failing Best Friend Squad faded away.

“I know it gets annoying to hear me ask --” Scorpia started. “The Bright Moon healers would have skewered me by now, I think, if I wasn’t acting head of the Horde.”

Technically Catra had given Scorpia the Horde, full stop, in a public comms line that went straight to Bright Moon. Acting wasn’t the right word, but Entrapta kept from correcting Scorpia. Calling herself only the acting leader of the Horde was Scorpia’s way of assuring herself that Catra would come back to them.

“It could take any amount of time,” Entrapta said, repeating what the Bright Moon healers themselves were saying. “Catra doesn’t have enhanced healing.”

“Do you think Adora could help her?”

Based on the evidence, the answer was no. Most of what Adora knew of her powers were destructive, the healing parts mostly reserved for herself.

Scorpia sat next to her, swiveling the wheels on her chair closer. They both stared at the screen because, Entrapta knew, they both didn’t want to face each other.

“I don’t know,” Entrapta said.

There were plenty of things Entrapta didn’t know about Catra. Sometimes she didn’t know if Catra was joking or serious, if she was sad or happy, but none had caused her heart to constrict as painfully as it did in that moment, not knowing if she was going to wake up or not. She managed a sideways look to Scorpia, whose face couldn’t muster a smile.

A tendril of Entrapta’s hair wrapped itself around Scorpia’s shoulder. It was all Entrapta could think to do.

//

//

//

Adora drifted in and out of consciousness the next day. The day after that, she was awake, but weak. The Best Friend Squad stayed next to her the whole time, telling their stories quietly, assuring her that it was a total victory, better than they expected, and that Bright Moon and the Horde were sharing resources now, starting with hers and Catra’s joint recovery.

Glimmer had awoken about a day after all the fighting finished. Bow came in at the tail end of the battle along with Swift Wind.

“We kind of bumped into the Fright Zone on our way to Salineas, and they let us rest then kept us updated about what was going on,” he said. "Scorpia nearly didn’t give us this ‘flight clearance’ thing, but she eventually relented and we made it to Mystacor in time to watch all the mages rebelling. For somebody who doesn’t have a bond with a runestone, Scorpia has a good handle on magic.”

Glimmer, on the other hand, still hadn’t forgiven the Horde for taking Adora away. Only Adora’s condition -- sensitivity to anything loud or bright -- kept her voice down.

In between their stories, a healer would check up on Adora. “You’ve depleted quite a bit of your magic,” the Bright Moon healer said. “It will take a while to feel normal.”

“But soon, right?” Glimmer interjected, across the bed. “It’s never taken me this long to recharge -- ” she broke off, watching Adora blink. The nausea was like being at sea, on a boat churned by the waves at every damn direction. Adora’s stomach was empty and bloated and roiling, all at the same time. The room swam, occasionally, but as long as Adora could focus on one thing -- Glimmer’s hair, or Bow’s voice, she could get by.

“You have a runestone, your Highness.”

“So does Adora, it’s her sword.”

“It was also depleted in the battle against Skeletor.”

“Is that really possible?”

“That’s the conclusion that both we and the Horde scientists have come to.”

“How’s Catra?” Adora asked, butting into the conversation.

After a brief pause, the Healer on her right said, “Recovering.”

“Can I talk to her?”

The Healer’s eyes flickered to Glimmer. Glimmer turned to face her. “She’s stable, but hasn’t woken up yet.”

“Hasn’t woken up yet…”

_If it took you days to wake up --_

If it took She-Ra days to wake up --

Adora sat upright. A lancing pain zapped up her right side, but she ignored it. Her last picture of Catra, suddenly sharp in her mind, had Catra bleeding out, missing a chunk of her own torso, a piercing wound on her left shoulder. The pain cuth through the hazy, unsure thoughts in her mind, pulling everything into focus.

“Where is she?”

That should have been her first question, not lying here listening to people tell her things.

“She’s just in another room, Adora, please let the healers worry about Catra,” Glimmer said. “You were both pretty beat up.”

“No! Dammit, I was supposed to go alone in the first place,” Adora said. Her bones creaked at every heave of her chest, as though her ribs would give out. The healer put a placating hand on Adora’s shoulder but it only made Adora angrier.

“Please, give it another day, She-Ra,” the healer said. Their voice suddenly seemed very far away. A heat spread out from where the healer had touched her. Magic, Adora realized too late, as she fell back and into the void.

//

//

//

Scorpia’s first order as Commander of the Horde was to suppress Catra’s hasty announcement that she, well, was the new Commander. Nearly all of the Horde knew her only as Acting Commander; and to Bright Moon, they would have to clean up the confusion that Catra had made. As the mission was top secret, everyone knew to be quiet about it anyway.

“It’s fucked up, man,” Lonnie muttered. They sat across from each other, on a table outside of one of the rehab buildings, watching the sunset. Patches of Dryl were still barren, but they at least had trees where they were staying. The area around Dryl Castle almost looked like a normal kingdom, with paved roads, buildings (in the Horde style) and vegetation. If it looked weird to anyone from Bright Moon, like a lovechild of Plumeria and the Horde, they kept it to themselves.

Dryl had been suggested for its neutral location and because it had, over the course of the war, turned into a rehab facility for Horde members. Bright Moon agreed and sent their healers to assist, headed by Princess Perfuma and the BFF Squad.

And now Adora was awake.

“You sure you don’t want to take them all hostage and buy us some time for Catra? Y’know, now that we don’t have any leverage on them and their hero woke up and all that.”

“Do you really think we need to do that?”

“A suspicious mind is kinda what kept us alive during the war.”

“We’re not in a war,” Scorpia told her, gaze even. “If you thought they were going to backstab us, we should have kept Catra in the Fright Zone to begin with.”

“Right.” Lonnie took out a flask from her messenger bag..

“Damn, I forgot to get something to drink. Is that lemon juice?”

“Uh, is ginger beer close enough?”

“...Just this once, yes.”

“Does it ever freak you out that you have to share this kingdom with the people we’ve been trying to kill since we were kids? I can’t even sleep at night, y’know, in case they try to pull something.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re thinking the same thing, especially considering that Dryl is our territory.”

“True,” Lonnie said, after a while.

“Don’t you think that Adora would have felt the same way, when we first captured her?”

“The Horde was her home. It’s not the same. These guys have been trying to kill us since I was a baby.”

They settled into their own thoughts as the sun sank, passing the flask back and forth between them.

“It’s going to seriously suck if she doesn’t regain consciousness,” Lonnie muttered. “Politically speaking.”

“I don’t care about the politics,” Scorpia snapped, “I just want her to wake up.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so callous,” Lonnie said, shrinking a little under Scorpia’s gaze. Scorpia shook her head. Lonnie hadn’t been there when the Horde had arrived at the Lunar Lenses, and she hadn’t had to watch as their medics tried to stanch the blood. Nor did she have to carry Catra, drops of red still falling at each step she took towards the aircraft from the number of wounds she’d sustained.

Scorpia took a deep breath. “It’s fine, I’m just… ”

“No, I was a jerk,” Lonnie said. “Well, Catra would say ‘but you’re always a jerk, Lonnie, what’s new?’”

“She would say that,” Scorpia agreed.

“And we still somehow do what she tells us to do.”

“Hey, she’s got us this far.”

“She’s always been crazy impulsive,” Lonnie added, after a pause. “I mean, what else are you gonna call dropping everything to run after your ex-lover? It’s almost like saving the Horde was a nice side-effect.”

Scorpia tilted her head. Nearly everyone, to Scorpia’s face, omitted any mention of Adora and Catra’s relationship. It was a carefully constructed blank space. Scorpia knew that space wasn’t going to last, not with everyone scrutinizing the two of them. Scorpia was asking herself what came next, and if what came next was good for Catra. “Was Adora?”

“Well,” Lonnie said, turning away from the heat of Scorpia’s gaze, “No. Probably not. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I was just saying what everyone’s already thinking or speculating or… y’know. They’re all the soldiers talk about.”

That was news.

“Is this some kind of bet?” From behind them, a tendril of Entrapta’s hair dragged a chair from a corner and sat next to Catra. Yet another tendril dipped into the flask and brought the drop to Entrapta’s waiting tongue. Her verdict: “Disgusting. Not nearly sweet enough.”

“We’re not betting on anything. We’re just… talking about Adora and Catra, once Catra wakes up.”

“I sometimes think,” Scorpia said, throwing caution to the wind, “that a lover you never had, is worse than a lover you did have, and left. Because you’re always wondering, what if?”

“I was actually surprised Catra was able to rein it in for so long,” Lonnie said. (At this point, Scorpia thought, _well, we’re having that conversation now._ ) “Well, okay, no, not really. I mean, I just thought at first that they were different people already. I mean, Catra has been different, ever since. Hm. Ever since the Shadow Weaver thing. She took to leading, more and more. And I respect that.” Lonnie said, grudgingly. “But then when she went and did this, I realized -- yeah, she may have just kept it under wraps, the whole time. She’s better at that than I thought.”

“She’s better at hiding than we gave her credit for,” Entrapta agreed.

“Well, guess Adora’s always had that effect on her.”

There was a question there, that Scorpia had been trying to find the answer to. “Do you think it goes both ways?”

“Honestly? I got no idea. I don’t know who the fuck Adora is anymore. And that’s a hell of a question to ask. What about you, Entrapta? You’re a scientist. You should be observant and all that, right? Y’think anything’s going to happen between them?”

“I don’t know about Adora,” Entrapta said. “But Catra would do anything for her.”

Lonnie burst into laughter. “Man, that is so weird, coming from you, especially!”

Entrapta didn’t say anything. She looked thoughtful, even pensive.

Lonnie went on talking. “I know you don’t care about politics, Scorpia, but the two of them would be… well, that’d be a really hairy situation, yeah?”

“That’s too far ahead for me to worry about.”

“Take care of the present and the future will sort itself out,” Entrapta said. “That’s what historical data tells us, anyway.”

//

//

_half awake, half asleep_

//

Lonnie’s wish was granted two weeks later, when Catra finally stirred. Immediately after the news broke out, every Horde soldier stationed in Dryl suddenly had a rotation around the wards. The Best Friend Squad and the Super Pal Trio plus some Force Captains held a meeting to sort out new schedules and other things that had been cropping up since the two sides were working with each other.

“I thought I’d seen everything, what are these fake timecards?” Scorpia said, holding up a stack. They all had different names, but one location -- the corridor around Catra’s room. “There are enough names on this timeslot to stuff a battalion in here.”

“Well, she’s the war hero that’s killed Hordak and was instrumental in taking down Skeletor. Guess a little bit of hero worship was to be expected,” Lonnie said dryly. “They’ve been nicking bits and pieces off her aircraft, too. A nut or a bolt here and there for good luck.”

One of the Force Captains, a boy with a patchwork beard, piped up. “No, that’s the Bright Moon soldiers, actually. They think her equipment has been enchanted by the She-Ra, or something like that.”

Having heard that Catra had been in Dryl before, on yet another miraculous recovery, both Bright Moon and Horde soldiers asked around for her favorite places, where she trained during rehab, or what gardens she frequented.

“Dryl didn’t even have gardens the last time Catra was here,” Entrapta muttered.

“Well, regardless, they’re pilfering pots, too,” Lonnie said. “If anything, Catra needs less guards and more quiet. Got any ideas how to keep the guards behaved?”

“We should just kick them out,” Entrapta said, “and have robots take over. Less organic matter means less breeding grounds for bacteria.”

“We’ll get a riot,” Lonnie countered. “We should have kept her in the Fright Zone to begin with.”

“She’s only awake now because we worked with the Bright Moon healers. And they weren’t going to trust us putting Adora in the Fright Zone.”

“We’re right here, y’know,” Glimmer muttered. “And yeah, if you want our help, Catra stays in Dryl. This is your side’s problem.”

“Um, excuse me,” another Force Captain piped in, “in case you weren’t listening, theft of Horde property is a crime.”

Scorpia groaned as each side bickered with the other. If Catra were here, she thought, she’d yell at them all to shut up. Somehow, running a war council was easier: there was a shared objective, and they knew how to argue over which plan was most likely to achieve their goal. Here though, the talking had dissolved to complaints about shifts, food, and missing screws in equipment. The two sides had no idea how to organize when they weren’t all agreeing to go to battle.

_Tap-tap-tap._

Scorpia sighed and walked over to the entrance. “The sandwiches can wait,” she said as she pulled the door open. “--Oh.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you turn down food,” Adora said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be staying outside. Just wanted to eavesdrop a little.”

“Should you even be up?”

“I was cleared to walk the other day,” Adora said cheerfully. “I think carrying a tray is the next step.”

Scorpia took a cucumber and dill sandwich.

“So uh, can I suggest something?”

“Sure,” Scorpia said.

“I’ll guard Catra,” Adora said. “And I think we should have like, a training workshop between the Horde and Bright Moon. They can steal all the bits and pieces they want while learning how to drive a van or repair something. And Bright Moon can explain the magic stuff. Should keep the guards busy if they’re not on guard duty.”

“Woah, woah, back up. You’ll guard Catra.”

“Yeah.” Adora said. “I think it’s the least I can do. And at least none of the guards get to complain about favoritism since they all won’t guard Catra. I think they can live with that.”

“Are you even fit to carry a sword?”

“I can turn into a buff eight-foot-tall lady. She’ll be be fit to carry a sword,” Adora said.

“I don’t think your side’s going to like that,” Scorpia said.

“But if they do agree,” Adora said, “You’ll go with it?”

Scorpia remembered that she still had the sandwich between her pincers. “Only if Lonnie guards her along with you,” Scorpia said, taking a bite out of the bread. “I think that’s fair. One Bright Moon representative, one Horde representative.”

“We got a deal, then,” Adora said.

“Deal.”

“So do they still want the sandwiches or…?”

Scorpia took the tray from her. “I think it’s best if they didn’t know you were here,” she said.

“Right, that decision was totally your idea, and is totally impartial,” Adora said.

After a brief pause, Scorpia said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

Adora looked up at her. This time, her smile reached her eyes. “Thought you were mad at me,” she said. “When you didn’t try to meet with me after I woke up.”

Had she been? Had she been blaming Adora for Catra’s situation? “Maybe a little,” she admitted. “But we’re good now.”

“We’ll talk, won’t we? When all that --” Adora tilted her head sideways towards the room abuzz with disagreements “--gets sorted out?”

“We will.”

//

//

//

Bright Moon refused to hand over their She-Ra for guard duty until the She-Ra herself insisted. By the end of the day, the Horde had issued a pardon over stolen items in good faith that Bright Moon wasn’t trying to steal their technology. That was close enough to peace and quiet as it got in Dryl, in Adora’s limited experience. It seemed that the whole base had been holding its breath for Catra to regain consciousness, and news of her short return to the waking world shattered the stasis Dryl was in, as though they’d finally got the signal: everything’s okay, now we can go back to bickering and hating each other.

If Catra hadn’t woken up… Scorpia would have had to find a scapegoat for the blame. The Horde wouldn’t take Catra’s situation lying down. Today’s meeting was nothing more than a class full of children in comparison to that.

Adora imagined Catra taunting her, _since when did you get so smart?_

“Don’t give me too much credit,” Adora muttered to herself, staring at the ceiling, sitting against the wall.

“What was that?”

Lonnie was on the other side of the corridor.

“Nothing!” Adora shouted.

Static crackled in her ear as a line opened. “We have a walkie-talkie, y’know,” Lonnie said.

“Right,” Adora said, “over.”

On the far end of the corridor, a door slid open. Lonnie snapped to attention, then slouched when she figured out who it was: Entrapta. Her hair, for the past few times Adora had seen her, had been limp, moving only when they had to. This time was no better.

Lonnie’s voice came through the walkie talkie. “Entrapta’s here to check on the machines.”

“Okay. Uh. Any improvement? Is she gonna wake up today?”

This time it was Entrapta’s voice that came through. “Not based on her readings right now. Give her some time.”

Before Adora could ask another question, Entrapta had opened the door to Catra’s room.

//

//

//

Inside the room, Catra was awake, though she kept her eyes closed. Entrapta pulled the blinds over the one and only window in the room, giving them some privacy. Catra’s ears perked up; she knew the squeak of Entrapta’s shoes. Once she heard the blinds were drawn, she opened her eyes for a peek. Entrapta nodded a tendril in response, but otherwise stuck to checking the equipment.

“It’s fuckin’ cold in here,” Catra rasped underneath layer after layer of blankets. She didn’t try to sit up -- her ribs would scream if they could. When Entrapta didn’t answer, she sighed. “All for my own good, huh?”

“Scorpia would say sorry, but it’s still necessary.”

“Yeah.”

Catra closed her eyes. They still got heavy quick. But she knew this view well enough: four white walls, she’d been forced to spend months in Dryl before.

“I just wanted to let you know, before anyone else barges in, that Adora’s outside, guarding the door.”

“Ugh! It’s my second fuckin’ day up, and she’s right there.”

“You don’t have to let her in. We’ve been saying that you’re floating in and out of consciousness.”

“That doesn’t sound like a perfect opportunity for remaining enemy forces to jump at us,” Catra said, irritated. A sharp pain formed a jagged line around her jaw -- probably because she was so tense -- but it was a tension she wanted to let loose, damn the pain.

“It’s been a month. I don’t think, given the combined might of the Bright Moon army and the Horde, that any country poses a threat to us right now, here in Dryl. Most of Skeletor’s forces are surrendered, with scattered bandits being taken down.”

“So we won, huh.”

“Did Scorpia already tell you how?” Judging from the measured tone of Entrapta's voice, Scorpia had told her to be slow with the news.

“No, I was out of it yesterday. I just got the general idea that I’ve been sleeping here since a month ago, and that I left everyone to clean-up duty. This morning, though, I was a little awake… I could hear the healers from Bright Moon.”

“That’s good. It’s as Scorpia said: we won, minimal casualties, as perfect an outcome as she could have hoped for, given the situation.”

Catra would have snorted if she could, but she reined it in. With her jaw in that state the pain wouldn’t have been worth it. When Entrapta didn’t say anything else, Catra cracked an eye open, looking for Entrapta’s shadow on the walls. She was at the far right of the room, fiddling with the occasional control. Catra could hear the flick of a switch every so often, the beep and whirr of machinery. Satisfied, she closed her eyes again, sinking into the pillows. “So Adora woke up before me, huh.”

“She did.”

“Did something happen? You’re not usually this quiet.”

“Sorry,” Entrapta said, “just finishing up. I don’t know. I wanted to see if you were truly as the readings said you were. By myself.”

Although Catra’s face occasionally throbbed in pain, she smiled at that. “Like what you see?”

“You’re alive,” Entrapta said. “And the healers are optimistic about your recovery.”

_It’s always so weird when she’s serious,_ Catra thought. She never got used to Entrapta’s bouts of seriousness. In her most competent, Entrapta wasn’t serious -- she was happy. It was something Catra didn’t have the strength to answer today, but she filed it away, hoping that she’d remember the next time she woke up.

“You’re kinda freaking me out,” Catra said, deadpan. “You sure there aren’t leftover remnants of the old Horde knocking at our door?”

“I'm sure,” Entrapta said. “I can guarantee you, Commander, that the past few weeks have been peaceful. And that Adora is alive and well, and that we won. And the rest… you’ll hear from it when you’re feeling better, from Scorpia.”

“That’s it, huh,” Catra said, feeling winded from all the talking, as though she’d been running between every breath she took.

“I’m opening the blinds.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t want to see Adora just yet,” Catra grumbled. “I’m going back to sleep. Get me something nice to eat next time, kay?”

“I will,” Entrapta said.

//

//

//

Adora had spent every day training since they cleared her. When she wasn't knocking someone back into the dust by the sheer force of her muscle, she was listening to debriefings (halfhearted and tired) or guarding Catra.

Guarding Catra was a selfish idea, and it turned out to one she hated. She was there, and awake sometimes, even, but only the healers, Entrapta, and Scorpia had access to her. Not her.

Never her, from the looks of it.

The thought made its way into her swing as she beat down hard on a boy training with her, causing him to crumple to his knees. She dropped her sword with a clatter. "Shit," she said, kneeling down to him. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to."

The boy's voice was wobbly as he waved off her apology. He looked just about to pass out.

"Uh... Medic!" Adora shouted into the quadrangle. The other soldiers snapped to attention. In a daze, Adora allowed herself to be sat down on a bench as the boy was taken to the infirmary. She sat there, remembering Shadow Weaver's words from another life.

_"You shall stand outside until you have reflected properly on your misbehavior," she had said, once, to Catra. And Catra had stood outside for the rest of the day, and well into the evening, until Adora had begged Shadow Weaver to make it stop._

She exhaled as she slouched against the wall. For the next half-hour or so, memories would pour out from a well in her mind, things far in the past that were hazy but for the occasional stab of guilt from a bad time or a warm pulse from the few bright spots she recalled.

She must have dozed off from all the training, because when she woke up, the sky was orange. Next to her, on the far side of the bench, someone stirred.

"Told 'em not to wake you up," Catra said. "Hungry?"

"Catra!"

"Yes."

Adora looked around. Nobody was left in the training quadrangle. She stilled the wild urge to hug Catra, who again looked as though they did this all the time.

"How's your ribs?"

"Magically stitched together, or so I'm told. I don't think they're there yet."

Adora stared into Catra's flank, covered by her maroon top, as though she could burn a hole and see for herself, if the skin were still ripped off. She put a hand to her mouth at the memory, the sudden sensation of burning flesh and burning everything.

"We won," Catra said, raising an eyebrow.

_Adora, breathe._

"We did," Adora said, speaking carefully. As always, it felt like Catra leading, and her following. But she wanted to follow, as long as it meant that Catra wouldn't disappear from view.

"They tell me it'll be a while before I can really move," Catra said, bringing out the same rod she'd used back when they were at the Whispering Woods.

_Should you even be walking,_ Adora wondered, but didn't say.

"I go to sleep for a few weeks and I wake up to Bright Mooners in Dryl," Catra said. "I got quite the shock."

"Same," Adora said.

"Not as huge as the shock... when you disobeyed orders," Catra said, looking at the wood grain that separated them. "I would have thought for sure that you would follow them."

To that, Adora said nothing. There were a thousand things at once, words that could tumble out of her mouth, and they all jammed somewhere between her throat and her heart.

"I don't really want to talk about it now, though," Catra said. "But I had to say something, because everyone tells me you've been sulking since I woke up."

Adora scowled. "Have not."

"Have too."

Adora shook her head, tried to clamp down on the strange, light feeling that was filling her up. _Catra,_ she wanted to ask, _what does this mean? It's over now. Are things better? Are things worse?_ In between the fear of being shut out, and the ferocious hope that came with the light teasing tone in Catra's voice, Adora clung to the pendulum and told herself to wait.

"It's going to be dinner time soon," Catra continued. "I gotta get back. But I'll see you...soon."

 

//

//

//

 

**AN:** So I had a fucked up August, and a weird September. I want to apologize for how awfully behind schedule I am with this posting. I will work hard to make up for it. Also, I am completely out of work these days, so hmu at tumblr. I do webdev/design/hosting work.

Also. Adora and Catra and the world at peace... how are they gonna deal with that?!? Stay tuned, folks.

**Author's Note:**

> i write a short log of what i am working on every weekend at [ateliersockpuppet.tumblr.com](http://ateliersockpuppet.tumblr.com)
> 
> please look forward to updates about every 3-6 weeks.


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